PART III

Foundations of Contemporary ED/CD

As the reader begins Part III she might consider that one foot is firmly lodged in the past, while the other is stepping into the future. Parts I and II have dwelled on the long history of what I call the “Classical Era” of American economic development. The reader is about to enter into the Contemporary Era. Let’s deal with each Era separately. The Classical Era is now reasonably known to the reader. It is Privatist, Mainstream ED, anchored by the chamber and chamber-led ED. The Depression, New Deal, and the changing Big City has put this approach on its back foot, and for better or worse, it has embraced urban renewal (and highways/freeways) as its solution to increasing suburbanization and a diminished vitality in its economic base. As we have seen Mainstream ED fought neighborhood, public housing CD over who would capture federal dollars, and the former was the more successful. Riding the urban renewal horse, however, will in the next chapters be like riding a bucking bronco—Mainstream ED will fall off the horse.

Community development is fragmented into wings—the neighborhood/public housing wing being “in power” at the moment—but all are facing headwinds due to ethnic migration to suburbs and the development of the African-American Second Ghetto. As we begin Part III, community development is facing an existential crisis on how to best deal with Big City neighborhoods. That will be an important storyline in the chapters ahead. By the time, we reach the Contemporary Era (about 2000), community development will be a strong rival of Mainstream ED. Municipal Big Cities, as they traverse the path through the next chapters, will evolve hybrid combinations of Mainstream and Community Development.

What about the South and the West? Their day will come in the next chapters. The rise of the Sunbelt will not be ignored, nor will we lack for description on the Second War Between the States. Future regional change means the urban/regional competitive hierarchy (the first level hierarchy) will shift and turn dramatically in the next chapters. To make matters interesting, the composition and configuration of regional jurisdictional bases will be different, and a new American economy will have evolved by the time we get to the Contemporary Era.

That brings us to the Contemporary Era. The Contemporary Era, in our mind, does not commence formally until the “Turn of the Twenty-First Century”. We are at the moment discussing the 1960s’ time period. What happened in between? This is the Transition Era (to the Contemporary Era—get it?) The Transition Era exhibited two distinct phases. First, the old Classical Era imploded—why? The Big Cities, and the northern hegemony, collapsed by 1975 or so. We shall detail those events and dynamics in Chapters 16 and 17 primarily. After 1975 (or so) a new “order” starts developing, complete with new paradigms, strategies, programs, and tools— policy systems, the vehicle that produces, these will also change. This development of a Contemporary Era is not a “turning the light bulb on or off” affair. The events and dynamics are very uneven during the Transition Age; economists early-on talked about “uneven development”.

There is a great deal of experimentation, a complex of policy whirlpools, the rise of new actors, and a dramatically changing environment during the Transition Age. There are no real paradigms that dominate in these transition years; there is much inertia. But the trend is private Mainstream EDOs will surrender ground to government EDOs. Old Classical Era strategies will persist: physical redevelopment, company assistance, jurisdictional economic base foci. Increasingly dynamics such as deindustrialization and the rise of “new gazelles,” a shift to service sectors and, to a polycentric metropolitan area will take their toll. Onionization, the survival of the older EDOs, in a rising sea of new EDOs is evident.

Despite an environment of revolutionary change, there is surprisingly a good deal of simple inertia, and continuity. The tendency has been to add departments and offices, and to continue those that cut their teeth in the past era. In many cases, older organizations, like chambers, refabricated their mission, even structure, and continued into the Contemporary Era as effective players. In other instances, older specialized EDOs occupy a niche, off-to-the-side of ED policy system. This is onionization. Port authorities are no longer thought of as EDOs.

Community Development with its neighborhood focus is another matter. That change will almost be revolutionary. At the onslaught of the Contemporary Era there will be probably as many CDOs working at the sub-municipal level as Mainstream EDOs working at the municipal and state levels. Mainstream EDOs will develop their own sub-municipal EDOs (BIDs, EDZs, FTZ, and TIF redevelopment districts). This is to say, that during the Transition Era the structure of American ED will change, as will its professional associations, Policy World, and supporting consultant/nonprofit complex that will evolve during these years. Siloization, forgotten since Chapter 1, will become a dominant characteristic of the policy area and profession by 2000.

If those changes were not sufficient, the political cultures of the Classical Era will also change—and that will be, arguably, as important to economic development as any shift in the American economy and jurisdictional economic bases. In Chapter 19 (and 20), the impact of environmentalism on American ED will be a theme that I suggest led to a redefinition of “growth”: the ultimate goal of American state and local ED. Population mobility and generational cohort shift in values and priorities will sort themselves out geographically (the Big (and little) Sorts), and will by the turn of the century result in a system that is polarized, politicized, Red State versus Blue State, Progressives versus Privatists, Community developers versus economic developers— which is a defining indicator that the “Contemporary Era” has finally arrived.

Finally, during the Transition Era, two related dynamics will play out. The collapse of the Big City Hegemony will mean not only that the first level regional/urban competitive hierarchy will be turned on its head, but the second-level hierarchy, the metropolitan hierarchy, will become, controversially, polycentric. That’s change “enuf” one would think, but wait. A third-level global hierarchy will enter into American state and local ED in a very big way. The global hierarchy has existed throughout our history—but I ignored it for the most part because this is a 700-page book. I cannot ignore it in the Transition Years—and it too is a defining feature of the Contemporary Era.

The third global competitive hierarchy will generate a great discussion: the Great Reindustrialization Debate, which raged through the seventies and into the nineties. That debate produced a host of new strategies, tools, concepts, approaches—and God knows what else. Innovation economics, Neo-Liberals, deindustrialization, sunrise/ sunset industry sectors, “mobility of capital,” and knowledge-based economics are only the tip of the program/strategy iceberg that evolved by the time the Contemporary Era began. That these programs and strategies got “smushed” (simplified, distorted, manipulated, selectively redefined) and politicized should also be assumed by the reader.

This much turmoil, experimentation, entrepreneurism, and so on inhibited the formation of paradigms, and accordingly, one sees fifty states hit or miss devising their own path into the Contemporary Era. That is yet another defining characteristic; the Contemporary Era consists of fifty state and local economic development policy systems, each different even though they share seemingly common tools, programs, and strategies. They do not by any means pursue the same goals, however, and their implementation is strongly affected by their various combinations/ configurations of political cultures and policy systems.

That diversity, complexity, and variation, the hallmarks of the Contemporary Era, mean that our history copes with the second phase of the Transition Era by identifying several “foundations” or pillars upon which the Contemporary Era will rest. Those foundations are: (1) federal role; (2) shifting sectors, reindustrialization debate, and jurisdictional economic base; (3) the rise in community development and Third Ghetto; (4) the rise of states as primary players in sub-state ED; (5) the third global competitive hierarchy challenges the urban/regional/metro hierarchies; (6) hyper-population mobility; and (7) environmentalism/Big Sort redefine growth. THE FOUNDATIONS OF THE CONTEMPORARY SYSTEM

Our three drivers (change in jurisdictional economic base, population mobility and competitive urban hierarchies) poured the foundation on top of the “Classical Era” described in Parts I and II. This is our “onionization.” Said and done, the old classic world was mostly Privatist and deeply rooted in jurisdictional business elites, our jurisdictional economic bases and the national, now global, corporate leadership. These elites were changing and new elites, public elites deeply rooted in the new municipal policy systems, had arrived on the scene. New actors—federal and state governments, global capitalist corporations, foreign investors and sub-municipal EDO/CDOs as well as a hyper-active, Progressive Policy World—were playing in our sub-state policy systems in ways that profoundly altered the processes of policy-making.

In this context, the foundations of Contemporary Era were incrementally, unplanned, semi-haphazard, unevenly poured over thirty years or so. Because almost everybody adopts the same strategies, uses the same tools, pursues virtually identical targets, and announces programs with essentially the same name, one might be mistaken there is some sort of consensus—that the herd shares the same values and goals. It doesn’t, and never did. States might be using TIF, for example, but TIFs differ state by state, and many states and municipalities don’t use TIF at all. How could we be polarizing and a battle of Red versus Blue states/cities exist if we all were doing the same thing?

The remainder of Part III describes issues and dynamics associated with each of the foundations specified above. The intention is to provide a bit of road map to the reader as she reads Part III. The reader is reminded Part III is concerned with the period previous to the turn of the twenty-first century.

1. The Federal Government

The government, for the most part an outsider to the classic state/sub-state ED policy system, stormed in and ripped the doors off the sub-state policy system in Chapter 16. It ain’t been the same since. The feds quickly pulled back, and appear to have settled into an important but secondary role (aside, of course, from macroeconomic policy which is outside our history’s scope). The Feds, for all practical purposes, relaunched and redefined CD in the sixties’ Great Society. Workforce, employment/labor assistance, and small business fall are federal carve-outs. A federal agency exists to support CD initiatives (HUD), and one (EDA) is a consistent ally of business/infrastructure/ redevelopment mainstream ED. A diversified system of federal agencies entered into the American state and local economic development world (NIST, EPA, BRAC),

2. Shifting Sectors, Reindustrialization Debate, and Jurisdictional Economic Base

The classic era of economic development centered principally on one sector— manufacturing. Certainly transportation, communication, energy, basic materials/ mining, and finance were meaningful in the jurisdictional economic base; but the gazelle was manufacturing. When deindustrialization hit much like the cotton boll weevil hit southern agriculture, that story seemed over. But simultaneously a sector categorized as “technology” and non-manufacturing sectors, loosely subsumed under the rubric of “service sector,” replaced manufacturing. Nevertheless, a Great Reindustrialization Debate ensued. From this debate a considerable number of strategies, programs, and tools essential to the Contemporary Era came to light. The management of the jurisdictional economic base changed character, stressing less business assistance than (1) chasing (i.e. attracting) and developing sunrise industries; and (2) development a new type of expanded agglomeration (cluster) through new strategies like entrepreneurism, innovation, university-driven ED—and many others.

3. The Rise in Community Development and Third Ghetto

CD was in disarray as we begin Part III. By its end community development had built up and expanded brand new wings and approaches, including an African-American “community economic development” wing which mirrored its dominant political culture. CD would thrive in the disruption created by the War on Poverty and later Great Society programs. The various movements and wings exploded during the 1970s, a Policy World infrastructure followed, and that decade was its golden years. From the 1980s onwards, CD has coped with the emergence of a Third Ghetto, a ghetto unable to penetrate the troubled, deindustrializing jurisdictional economic base, and unwilling, or unable, to assimilate into the larger society.

4. Rise of States as Primary Players in Sub-State ED

Owner of Dillon’s Law, the state government holds potential total mastery over sub-state ED policy systems. During the Classical Era the state was an intermittent, not always helpful player in ED. In the Transition Era period the state enters (and boy does it enter!) into state and sub-state economic development. Like the federal government’s, that forceful role could change, but it has crystallized since the 1990s. The pace of state involvement was uneven, often driven by both crisis below and gubernatorial initiative/ opportunity above. The involvement predictably varied by state and region—and political culture was again evident. An interesting variant, a state-level CD/ED hybrid, emerged, also with predictable variation in the balance between CD and ED. Chapter 19 contains an extended case study of Massachusetts as a teachable proxy for the 50 state/sub-state systems that emerged since the mid-1980s. Municipal jurisdictions on the whole lose power during the Transition Era.

5. The Third Global Competitive Hierarchy Challenges the Urban/Regional/Metro Hierarchies

The North/Midwest hegemony breaks asunder during Part III, accompanied by the rise of the Polycentric Suburbs and the simultaneous rise of the Sunbelt. Suburbs keep on growing, institutionalizing themselves as autonomous policy systems; in so doing they fade into the metro background. What emerges is a real or de facto polycentric metropolitan competitive hierarchy. Unimagined diversity, the suburbanization of poverty, aging of infrastructure and housing, and the demographic blurring of neighborhood succession exact their toll. The variation among suburbs is enormous. Chapter 18 will discuss a central city comeback, while acknowledging the institutionalization of the polycentric suburb. Our contemporary metro landscape is essentially in place before the turn of the century.

The national urban competitive system and the regional urban competitive hierarchies were radically disrupted by the mid-1970s’ Second War Between the States. ED is the principal battlefield in that war, dealt with mostly in Chapter 17 but again in Chapter 19. Called regional change, or the rise of the Sunbelt, it is more than that. The war passed, sort of, but became an element of contemporary politicization. In the wake of this change regions fragment into sub-regions, each with distinctive jurisdictional economic bases and styles and strategies of ED/CD.

Metaphorically, in 1973 another competitive hierarchy entered the picture—little noticed. What this history labels as the “hierarchy of global competitive advantage,” a global economic hierarchy formalized—a hierarchy extremely sensitive to our industry/ sector profit life cycle, trade, and currency volatility. After 1973, postwar Bretton Woods international finance gave way to a new economically competitive system in which floating currencies, not the gold standard, profoundly affected the flow of goods and services across nations. Currency rates in particular injected considerable volatility into sub-state jurisdictions. The industry/sector profit cycle became even more footloose and fancy-free. The effects of this new hierarchy have proven so profound that they will be a core element in the subsequent volume.

6. Hyper-Population Mobility

Population mobility again enters the ED picture in a very big way during the Transition Era. It comes in several forms, which include the largest immigration wave ever experienced by the United States. A succession of generational cohort migrations seriously affected the political cultures of their adopted cities, which, in turn, were presented with “opportunities” to exploit their alleged “creativity.” Finally, a new type of generational cohort mobility, the aged, wandered about creating Del Webb shuffle court and golf paradises, and a host of other new cities across the nation. Retirement communities became an accepted phrase in economic development as did “entertainment cities” and master-planned cities. Condos and homeowner associations, so-called Privatopia, further diversified metropolitan suburbs, and presented new challenges to suburban economic developers.

7. Environmentalism/Big Sort Redefine Growth

By the turn of the century the reality of “decline” had permeated into the previously exclusively growth-biased ED political cultures. Change and decline interact in Part III, and a notable feature has been a redefinition of “growth.” That redefinition struck at the core of the practice of ED and, expressing itself in an increasing politicization, partisanship, and ideologically polarized popular culture, has assumed a geographical expression due to a “Big Sort,” “Red and Blue” biased population mobility. This Big Sort reset the political cultures of many communities/ jurisdictions’ political culture and reset many a policy system. Environmentalism played a very big role in this transformation. This cultural evolution is fundamental to our policy systems and to the outputs they produce and implement. This evolution is so fundamental to American economic development that it is the concluding topic in Chapters 19 and 20—the key hinge topic to our subsequent volume.

16. Chapter 16 Begins: The sixties

So we begin “Contemporary Economic/Community Development.” This chapter concentrates on the 1960s. Two motifs (themes) dominate our chapter: the federal government and the spectacular rise of new forms of community development. Not so obvious, however, is the unspoken backdrop of intensified suburbanization that will be dealt with in Chapter 18.

In 1961, with a new administration in charge of the federal government, a conscious set of decisions transformed Washington into a major, arguably primary player in sub-state economic development. It played that role until the middle 1970s. In these few years the feds played their most substantial role, ever, in American sub-state economic development. In so doing, Washington, not alone by any means, changed the course of our two ships. It starts with John Fitzgerald Kennedy—and his brother Robert.

THE KENNEDY YEARS

When voters woke up on November 9, 1960 the Democrats had won control of the presidency, Senate and House—a sort of hat-trick for politics. Kennedy garnered 49.7 percent of the vote to Nixon’s 49.6 percent. However it went, the election passed the baton to the World War II “greatest” generation. The priorities and values that slipped into federal policy during JFK’s administration built onto FDR’s New Deal a hard-fought Cold War prosperity and an American economy and society transitioning into unknown territory. JFK’s theme, “the New Frontier,” talked about space, science, geographic-focused poverty (West Virginia). He assembled a cabinet and network of advisors since described as the “best and the brightest”; it was an administration dominated by Ivy League academic experts. With glamour, grace, sophistication and a young family, he presided over an administration portrayed as “Camelot.”

As a public policy issue, poverty ranked high by the early 1960s. Oscar Lewis’s Five Families (1959) and Michael Harrington’s The Other America (1962) blazed new ground. Lewis’s work described a “culture of poverty,” asserting that the poor were not kept poor solely by institutions and discrimination, but by a culture that socialized members into a value system that led to “wrong” decisions. Socialization in a poor family carried within it the risk of being inculcated into a value system that perpetuated poverty. This poverty cycle had to be broken, the value system changed, if poverty was to be cured. Harrington picked up on Lewis; his book discovered an “invisible land of the poor” isolated in rural areas and in urban slums. Kennedy read Harrington’s book and appointed him to his administration:

The poor are invisible … people who lack education and skill, who have bad health, poor housing, low levels of aspiration and high levels of mental distress … And if one problem is solved, and the others are left constant, there is little gain. [Needed to reverse poverty] was a broad program of] remedial action—a comprehensive assault on poverty. (Isserman, 2009)

Kennedy’s most significant economic development legislation—the 1961 Area Development Act and the 1962 Manpower Development and Training Act (MDTA)—proved important ED innovations. Workforce had been a federally led ED strategy, but Kennedy’s MDTA departed from earlier federal manpower/labor programs, shifting from concern with national defense and unemployment to structural poverty, job creation and economic revitalization in geographically depressed areas. Kennedy’s first major sub-state ED initiative was not manpower, however, but area-wide or regional economic development. Kennedy started down a path that shifted away from FDR’s Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) to federally financed ED tools (revolving loans) infrastructure, public facilities, urban renewal and, yes, manpower training.

Area Development Act (1961)

The New Deal linked infrastructure and public works to job creation. War production federal assistance included attempts to include small business and counter “worker shortage and surplus” areas, but post-WWII industrial decentralization (industry relocation and preferred war contracts) presented new opportunities and problems for linking federal defense spending to jobs. The first conscious postwar example was the Defense Manpower Policy Number Four (DMP No. 4), whose intent was to “channel all government spending into the areas hardest hit by economic troubles” (Lotchin, 1993, p. 58). DMP No. 4, unexpectedly, got sandbagged by auto and textile industry unemployment, and Secretary of Defense Charles Wilson channeled it to Detroit, Massachusetts and Connecticut—the latter two alone received five and one and a half times respectively more defense contracts than the five southern states charged with piracy (Lotchin, 1993, pp. 60–61). Accordingly, DMP No. 4 got caught up in the earlier described politics of industrial decentralization.

After 1956, concern for distressed geographies with high levels of unemployment shifted to the Senate Committee on Labor and Public Welfare (Miernyk, 1965, pp. 165–72). Led by Illinois Senator Paul Douglas, hearings/joint reports on lowincome families revealed that low-income, depressed regions were scattered throughout the nation. This triggered five bills calling for an independent “Depressed Areas Administration” (a cheerful, charming name). The bills empowered the feds to make loans to businesses expanding or relocating to “labor surplus areas.” Also included were funds for individual retraining (vocational schools). Senate/House support was hard to come by, however. Douglas dogged the issue, submitting bills each year through 1961.

Kennedy was deeply affected by West Virginia’s pervasive rural poverty. Having committed to depressed area revitalization, Kennedy embraced Douglas’s Senate bill—leading to passage of the 1961 Area Redevelopment Act (ARA). ARA broke with previous federal public works programs, shifting away from past goals and broadening federal redevelopment initiatives into manpower; direct job-creating loans to private corporations; utilizing public facilities-based renewal projects to provide infrastructure and jobs; and, in general, injecting the Department of Commerce into rural economic development. The approach was bi-modal: it continued Privatist strategies such as infrastructure and business assistance/attraction with CD people-focused workforce programs.

In the rural areas, as in the urban slums … community development … require[s] a coordinated multifunctional approach—the preparation and adoption of comprehensive plans for attacking simultaneously a wide variety of community shortcomings; the mobilization of the resources of many agencies … new leadership and more extensive citizen participation. (Sundquist, 1969, p. 131)

ARA certainly reflected New Deal programs such as the TVA. It was the first postwar federal geographically targeted ED program, located in the Department of Commerce (a subject of considerable controversy). Opposition, largely from northern politicians and labor unions, especially the Textile Workers of America, was substantial and never abated during the program’s existence.¹ The US Chamber of Commerce opposed the program, and a widespread perception in the South that ARA facilitated the civil rights movement limited its support and effectiveness. Many communities were uncomfortable being characterized as “distressed.” The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), uncooperative at first, eventually assisted in facilitating “rural development committees.”

Although ARA included both urban and rural counties, the program was the first non-USDA rural, extra-infrastructure job-creating initiative. In that ARA included a small retraining Department of Labor (DOL) program, it extended a federal toe into the manpower–workforce policy area. Providing hints of a future “creative federalism,” ARA authorized grants direct to localities for infrastructure (public facilities), including water, street and sewer improvements as well as business loans: one-third of ARA appropriation—reflecting a belief that depressed areas’ lack of capital was a primary barrier to economic growth.² Urban renewal projects qualified for infrastructure assistance. ARA financed 316 projects that claimed creating 40,000 jobs (Roth et al., 2002, p. 2). The secretary designed 300 rural counties in addition to 230 rural counties in the USDA Rural Development Program. By 1964, designated counties doubled to nearly 1000.³ Appropriations, however, remained unchanged; in 1963 funding terminated completely. Many, maybe most, of the designated counties did not meet legislative criteria. The program’s sun set in 1965.

One can trace the evolution of the Economic Development Administration (EDA’s) infamous Overall Economic Development Plan (OEDP) from the Area Redevelopment Act. James Cobb asserted that ARA prompted formation of many southern local industrial development corporations (Cobb, 1993a, p. 53).⁴ ARA loans required a local match, and the Local Industrial Development Corporation (LIDC) offered a convenient structural vehicle with which to participate in ARA programs. Even in those states that provided match at the state level, LIDCs were a useful local monitor and responsible entity. Given that nearly 1000 counties submitted applications, ARA’s incentive to form LIDCs was likely not confined to the South. It is a guess only, but ARA may have stimulated county-level EDOs in local economic development.

ARA firmly embedded a notion characteristic of future federal loan programs: that federal aid should not shift jobs and firms—redistribute pepperoni on pizza slices so to speak. Any employment created from the Act’s funding or projects could not “transfer jobs from one area of the United States to another.” From the depressed regions’ perspective, creating jobs in an area of such demonstrated need is necessary and desirable—even if they derive from shifted jobs and relocated firms. For others, however, usually those in the Policy World or the losing jurisdiction, legitimate job creation required net new jobs. Interestingly, shifting workers through “voluntary” relocation from a labor surplus area is not. Worker mobility has always been legitimate, and arguably a primary workforce strategy—even with public funds.

Typically, labor surplus areas are victims of structural change, and areas and their residents that are hurt by structural change are frequently unable as well as unwilling to relocate:

Some workers … do not respond to the pull of market forces. This is not always because workers are unwilling to move, but also because they recognize that age and lack of education or training [and occupational experience] limit their chances of finding employment elsewhere … Home ownership, attachment to friends … family … and community are often the cause. (Miernyk, 1965, p. 170)

These concerns are timeless and support place-based economic development efforts such as ARA.

Public Works Acceleration Act (1962)

This little-known legislation, approved in May 1962 after hard negotiation with Congress, connects New Deal programs linking workforce housing to public work construction as a sub-state unemployment strategy. The Kennedy initiative, based on the 1946 Employment Act, hoped to achieve Keynesian “full employment.” The Act granted authority to allocate construction funds for federal facilities and direct grants to state/local governments (50–75 percent match) for public facilities in (ARA) redevelopment areas or communities with high unemployment. Eligible construction projects had to be “substantially completed” within a year (shovel-ready meant something in the good old days). Water, sewer plants, streets, public buildings and recreation facilities were the chief beneficiaries.

Kennedy intended the Act to be countercyclical, to “revitalize the economy by a general expansion of public construction,” and the Act could be thought of as a pilot program for federal (physical) countercyclical involvement in sub-state jurisdictional economic bases. The $400 million approved in 1962 ($500 million in 1963) was a pittance, however, doing little to relieve local unemployment, address local public facility needs or achieve full employment. Still, the 1962 Act exposed issues associated with achieving full employment through a public works strategy. The Act also had its “darker” side in that one could also see it as an initiative, visible to city voters, that the federal government was doing its part to alleviate the 1962 recession.

Kennedy was concerned whether full employment could fully ameliorate the all-too-evident reality of structural unemployment and area-wide depression: “We could have a great boom and still have [high structural] unemployment” (Freeman, 1965,1975). Addressing structural or chronic problem areas had subtly entered into ED policy. Economists of the period were dismissive of public works as a full employment strategy. Their principal criticism of public works was that it was “too slow in starting and too late in ending” (Freeman, 1965, p. 175). The public works classic of the era, McKean and Taylor’s Public Works and Employment from the Local Government Point of View, concluded that “Even allowing for the full effect of the multiplier and pump priming, … a program to stabilize state and local public works would influence the economy to an insignificant degree” (McKean and Taylor, 1955, p. v). Public works, however, was the preferred strategy of the local politician; the voter could see and touch public works and it was proof their community was getting its share. As a presidential election strategy, public works directly connected the President to the local community resolving its problems.

The key issue of whether public works was a timely solution to local unemployment focused on whether anything like “shovel-ready” (the term was not used in the 1960s) was realistic and desirable. Shovel-ready seemingly required advanced planning, it was believed, that went miles beyond blueprints, site engineering and cost minimization, into controversial questions that included: evaluation of alternatives; whether the facility should be built at all; and who would benefit (or not). Plans touched off competing ideologies and partisanship, and the result of a plan was often the need for more plans. Long before NIMBY became our profession’s mascot, it was questioned whether shovel-ready was a realistic concept.

To make matters more difficult, public works as a strategy to create local employment raised issues of whether public works could hire unskilled workers in volume, or rather by nature required skilled workers to construct facilities in a timely and quality-acceptable manner. Construction, by its nature, is less wage and salary driven than site acquisition, equipment and materials driven. Most of a construction budget was consumed by non-wage expenses, and the required adoption of the Davis–Bacon Act (1931) meant that skilled labor costs would be sufficiently high to preclude lower-skill employment in volume. It was these factors, indeed, that had severely punished NIRA’s 1933 housing and slum removal program. Thus it was evident, even by the time of JFK, that if one wanted to get income into the hands of the unemployed, the faster and more direct method was “work relief”—i.e. welfare or unemployment assistance (Freeman, 1965, pp. 179–92).

Public works as a federal sub-state economic development strategy to achieve full employment or to relieve high unemployment was by the early 1960s regarded as at best uncertain, and likely to be unsuccessful in addressing unemployment. As a “political” ED strategy, federal public works had some merit—but its practical effects on unemployment, skills training or addressing local public facility need was unremarkable. There is one huge qualification to this observation: if the goal of public works shifts away from unemployment mitigation or skills training to, say, simple facilitation of a desired public work (a sewer plant, community center, safe bridge) then a federal public works program may indeed have merit.

1962 Manpower Development and Training Act (MDTA)

MDTA marked the formal debut of contemporary federal manpower/workforce policy. ARA had touched on training for the unemployed—pioneering federal payment of a subsidy to the unemployed worker in a training program. This was important because, at the time, most states did not allow the unemployed to receive unemployment benefits in a training program; 21 states did—Massachusetts (and DC) were pioneers (Murray, 1965, p. 75). Government-assisted worker training need not be linked only to the unemployed. General “industrial” education can be traced to 1820 Boston when trade instruction was introduced into high schools. In 1880 St. Louis Manual Training School (connected to Washington University) became the model for high school manual training. The National Society for Promotion of Industrial Education was formed in 1906.

The federal government has a long tradition of providing training-related programs. The 1862 Morrill Land Grant Act (teachers’ colleges) may have been the first entry, but the Smith–Hughes Act (1917) facilitated vocational education in agriculture, industry and home economics, while the 1933 Wagner–Peyser Act and a long string of subsequent federal programs demonstrate with certainty a federal commitment to manpower. The US Office of Vocational Rehabilitation has been involved with training workers with disabilities for jobs since the 1920s. As late as 1958, the National Defense Education Act authorized training for skilled technicians. In 1961 over 3.85 million were enrolled in vocational education (Somers, 1965, p. 228). Wisconsin may have been the first state to embrace apprenticeship training (1915 State Industrial Commission), but the federal Bureau of Apprenticeship and Training (1937) worked with unions, vocational schools and private employers. During the World War II the Training within Industry section of the Office of Production Management disseminated “best practice” materials, with a focus on supervisors.

State (and local) involvement in training beyond vocational education “have been crash programs for specific groups of displaced workers or for specific jobs in individual establishments; … relatively small … hampered by inadequate appropriations” (Somers, 1965, pp. 229–30)—or specifically linked to receiving welfare of unemployment benefits (Chicago and Milwaukee). By 1961, 21 states allowed unemployment benefits to be paid while receiving training. The first “full-fledged,” reasonably funded state program for training the unemployed was in 1957 Pennsylvania. The law required high schools to offer courses for the unemployed; by 1960 nearly 2000 unemployed were enrolled. In 1961 West Virginia and Ohio followed Pennsylvania’s example (Somers, 1965, pp. 229–30).

The Ford Foundation established its National Manpower Council in 1951. Over the decade, the Council asserted that there was no shortage of manpower, but rather a greater need to improve upon the quality of that manpower. To that end, it published a significant report in 1955, Improving the Work Skills of the Nation. The report advocated changes in the educational system, curricula, two-year college training and that business and government ought to prioritize involvement into this new policy area. The best level from which to confront these issues was the community. The fear was that skill-driven unemployment would result in structural unemployment—with an increasingly large percentage of the American workforce permanently unemployed or underemployed.

[I]n an increasingly technical age, the expanding employment occupations were those that placed a premium upon well-educated and highly skilled applicants; simultaneously, job opportunities for those without these qualifications were disappearing rapidly … The remedies … were remedial education and specialized job training. (Briggs Jr., 2016)

The Department of Labor in 1954 created by administrative order the Office of Manpower Administration and revamped its renamed Bureau of Apprenticeship and Training. The BLS produced datasets on the readjustment of industries and communities affected by automation. It also published the Occupational Outlook Handbook and a special study, Manpower Needs of the Sixties. In the last years of the Eisenhower administration, our old friends Senator Paul Douglas and Senator Joseph Clark developed proposals that led to the Vocational Retraining Act of 1961—still primarily focused on educational institutions and adjusting unemployment compensation to allow for training and retraining. Eligibility for retraining problems was limited.

Arthur Goldberg, Kennedy’s Secretary of Labor, introduced the DOL to the issue. His goal was to move beyond vocational education. In April 1961 Goldberg created the DOL Office of Automation and Manpower. The Bureau of the Budget was not only supportive of a new program, but also a key staff member, Michael March, assumed leadership. Working with Clark and a network of state/local/school organizations, in 1961 a new proposal was formalized into the bill that became MDTA. With divided union reaction, the bill faced a number of cross-currents, but was approved in February 1962.

MDTA authorized a three-year program for workers displaced by technology, and a training allowance for unemployed workers. Local public and private agencies were eligible to receive funds to identify and provide training to upgrade the skills of displaced workers. No formal link was made to actual job creation. Up to 52 weeks of training was authorized. MDTA created new pools of funds that motivated states to develop workforce EDOs eligible for DOL programs. Demonstration projects, research and on the job training (OJT) solutions over the next few years expanded the program. The federal government had entered into skills training, separate from educational and vocational training, and had thus pioneered an economic development approach to workforce training. The Department of Labor housed the program and assumed leadership over manpower–workforce policy.

By the early 1960s the civil rights movement revealed longstanding discriminatory employment practices that limited black workers to the lowest-paid and lowest-skilled employment. Manpower and training programs were tasked to reduce poverty and confront Great Migration Big City disruption. A string of subsequent federal legislation played a desperate game of catch-up with what was called a “manpower programmatic revolution.” In 1963 the Vocational Education Act was amended yet again, and was followed by the Great Society’s revolutionary Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, and then by the 1967 Social Security Act. By the end of the 1960s there were at least 30 separate federal training programs—an entirely new manpower/workforce system was in operation.

 

INNOVATION IN COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT

Men may find God in Nature, but when they look at cities, they are viewing themselves.

(Paul Ylvisaker, Life Magazine)

While JFK, Senator Douglas and Arthur Goldberg were trail-blazing a federal path in the direction of Keynesian-economics and people-focused CD, the Ford Foundation and “urban guerillas” innovated disruptive new programs that consciously intended to create an alternate community development path—a paradigm as potentially revolutionary as anything done previously. A “nexus of change” formed between the Policy World and Kennedy political appointees/bureaucrats. By November 1963 that group developed the nucleus/DNA of key concepts that later were encapsulated into the 1964 War on Poverty—the opening economic development salvo of the Great Society. That internal “policy nexus” begins with the Ford Foundation’s programmatic initiatives which we describe below.

Disruption would be guaranteed by convincing the powerful federal government to not only fund the new programs but also to apply its political muscle to lure/compel sub-state actors to follow them into this brave new world. Left behind would be the CD housers and neighborhood physical developers who were then engaged in slum clearance and neighborhood redevelopment around housing. A new dawn in the Age of Community Development was on its “threshold of a dream.”

Community development’s core concept is that it is people, not business focused. The new set of Ford Foundation/federal government CD initiatives proved to be extremely disruptive to old-style housing/neighborhood CD, but even more so to the Privatist-, state- and local-oriented mainstream ED. Crossing over several fault lines, they fostered heavy-duty politicization within our policy area—more than northern hegemony and southern “piracy” were doing. The new CD’s linkage with the federal government was the key to its dramatic entry into our policy area—and the chief ingredient that led to inevitable politicization. The involvement of the federal government in state and sub-state policy spheres, without the legitimizing threat/reality of war or depression, into a policy area heretofore locally dominant, was guaranteed to stir someone’s juices. That it was done with good intentions will only compound the schism.

People-based community development is intended for meaningful economic opportunity for all who live within its jurisdictional boundaries. But not all need help equally, and CD’s focus has always been on those who most need help the most. In these years (1950s and 1960s), despite the overwhelming exuberance of the American economy, culture, military and political power, difficult economic realities—race, unemployment, automation and poverty—will be perceived as structural barriers that inhibit or preclude the disadvantaged from seizing economic, political and social opportunity. Breaking through these structural barriers was a role for the federal government—and that has remained a mainstay relationship for a redefined community development.

Woodlawn, Gray Areas and Mobilization for Youth (MFY)

From the mid-1950s the Ford Foundation started a series of experimental programs in urban areas across the nation. One of these was the Gray Areas Program, designed and advocated in 1955 by 33-year-old urban planner and educator Paul Ylvisaker. Much has been written about the Ford Foundation’s Gray Areas.⁵ Gray Areas and Mobilization for Youth are directly linked to the War on Poverty and much of the Great Society—“community action” evolved from both.

Ylvisaker, a Harvard PhD, advisor to Philadelphia Mayor Joseph Clark turned Ivy League faculty, was recruited to the Foundation in 1955 and subsequently developed experimental programs centered on physical urban reforms, such as housing and urban renewal, as counters to the metropolitan crisis of the era. By 1960 Ylvisaker, perceiving disruption caused by physical urban redevelopment/housing/slum clearance, had “drifted” into “people problems,” away from bricks and mortar and urban governance. Integration of human services and a concern with racial change and race relations were central programmatic concepts (O’Connor, 1966, pp. 600–606).

Shortly before Gray Areas, and completely independent of it, was a shadow movement in the Woodlawn neighborhood of Chicago. Woodlawn was a reaction against the soon to be old-style housing/slum removal neighborhood CD. Using tactics and a community-organizing CD strategy developed by Saul Alinsky, it would serve as model for other neighborhoods and social activists, and a metaphor for us. Drawing from its own roots, no small part of which was resistance to slum removal to create public housing, another CD alternative path was becoming cohesive. That path would insert itself into the political and administrative chaos/vacuum created by the intrusion of the Great Society into local and Big City policy systems. Woodlawn-style community organizing was not an intended feature of Great Society community action, but the two became fused (or confused) for a period of time—and that was all it took. But let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves. First the basics.

Woodlawn

Up until 1948, Chicago’s Woodlawn neighborhood was white, middle-class, ethnic, originally populated by workers from the 1993 Chicago Exposition. Home to many University of Chicago professors, the neighborhood of nearly 73,000 residents underwent dramatic racial change during the 195’s. Lorraine Hansberry’s play A Raisin in the Sun tells the story of the neighborhood’s first black family. Fearing blight’s impact from the nearby Hyde Park neighborhood (Hirsch’s Second Ghetto then in the process of slum removal and neighborhood transition), the University of Chicago urged preemptive housing/slum removal in Woodlawn that triggered its own intense racial transition—and widespread arson. An alliance of black pastors (Arthur Brazier) operating within Alinsky’s umbrella Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), led by his successor Nicolas von Hoffman (Alexander, cited in this history, is his son), formed their own group, The Woodlawn Organization (TWO), to resist urban renewal and integrate African-Americans into the Woodlawn neighborhood. In 1960, adopting Alinsky’s community organizing principles, TWO worked with von Hoffman in developing a semi-political/economic development strategy that fell clearly into the community mobilization wing of community development.

TWO organized actions against local businesses that gauged consumers, attacked overcrowding in neighborhood schools, organized rent strikes and aggressively fought the University of Chicago’s urban renewal plan—TWO insisted that low-income housing be first built on vacant land before any active units were torn down. TWO eventually gained a seat on the planning board and stopped further slum removal. While it may have aggressively contested the development of the Second Ghetto, TWO was unable to stop racial transition. Counter-intuitively perhaps, during the 1960s Woodlawn lost over one-third of its resident population (this is a characteristic of the Second Ghetto). Older neighborhood institutions moved, many to the suburbs. The neighborhood became solidly black.

Gray Areas

Borrowing from Raymond Vernon’s “gray belt,” Ylvisaker defined these as potential slums pressured by structural shifts in the economy and residential markets—areas that Ylvisaker believed concentrated the disruption induced by physical redevelopment and racial change. Gray areas were neighborhoods where programs should be introduced to “citify our in-migrant populations.” Recognizing pathologies of what Hirsch later called the Second Ghetto, Ylvisaker asserted that 1960 gray area neighborhoods could no longer perform the socializing function they had for previous generations of immigrants. For him, gray areas were:

a wretched form that has lost the saving grace of a noble function [assimilation] … their escape into better jobs and neighborhoods is slowed by the depressed conditions they live in or by the color they were born with … The challenge to the cities was to revitalize the gray areas and “perfect the process” of assimilating and making “first class citizens” of the in-migrants … in one generation. (O’Connor, 1966, p. 606)

Developing several programs, first in housing and then a “Great Cities School Improvement Program,” the Ford Foundation made grants to several Big Cities to establish “citifying” pilot programs focused on culturally deprived/disadvantaged in-migrants. These programs attempted to positively impact families and home life, and to coordinate any social services these individuals might require. Each grant was constantly evaluated, training workshops were provided and distinguished experts brought in to assess findings and effectiveness of the grants. After a year or so, Ylvisaker came to the conclusion that if these people-changing programs were to have any effect, social services, schools and government agencies had to be linked in a common effort that overcame their “guild-ism” (siloization).

Ylvisaker injected this new theme into Gray Areas—not to focus exclusively on one policy area, say juvenile delinquency, but to simultaneously involve a slew of policy areas that collectively prevented individual mobility/change; not to “target one institution, but the whole tangled network of agencies responsible for housing, social services, and employment for the poor” (O’Connor, 1999b, p. 175). Thus, enlarged Gray Areas offered a diversified, but managed, package of services sufficient to the task of personal, family and social change. That is what community developers call “comprehensiveness.” It has evolved into a defining characteristic of the foundation approach to community development.

To receive follow-up grants cities, their mayors and bureaucracies had not only to provide a match; they also had to plan a coordinating process that could innovate as well as implement focused programming. Five cities were involved: Boston (headed by Ed Logue, a former Ylvisaker staff member), Oakland, New Haven, Philadelphia and DC. Each of these cities devised its own programmatic approach to Gray Area targets. In each demonstration project, Gray Areas established a community organization to coordinate the programs and link community institutions. In that Gray Area programs contemplated a systematic “revamping of neighborhood—a reshaping of the entire social and human system”—it is not surprising many agencies and institutions resisted. The “quality and effectiveness of local leadership was also a limitation” (Mossberger, 2010, pp. 63–5). In any case, the cycle of poverty could be broken through coordination of neighborhood bureaucratic initiatives.

At this point (1963), Gray Areas/the Ford Foundation became more complicated and complex. Municipal grantees intermingled Gray Areas’ implementation with grants from the DOL’s Office of Manpower and Training. The overlap was most pronounced with juvenile delinquency grants, one of which being New York City’s Mobilization for Youth (MFY). That offered an opportunity to Ylvisaker and the Ford Foundation to join efforts with the Kennedy administration—in this case with the administration’s evolving, embryonic, anti-poverty community-action approach being forged in task forces within the DOL. There was, however, a shift in approach that Ylvisaker was uncertain of—Gray Areas focused on urban bureaucracies and the DOL’s approach focused on people rehabilitation. In the DOL’s approach, urban service bureaucracies were to be “coordinated,” not by Ylvisaker’s coordinating agency but through something called “community action.” Accordingly, it is now helpful to switch to the MFY program so as to ground the reader in that approach.

Mobilization for Youth

Unlike Gray Areas, MFY was a bottoms-up policy process. It resulted from a grant application developed within NYC’s Henry Street Settlement House (Helen Hall its director), the coordinator for six other neighborhood settlement houses, submitted to the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). The proposal advocated a program to counter juvenile delinquency in these neighborhoods, and was returned to Henry Street for further study and refinement. Two Columbia University professors, Lloyd Ohlin and Richard Cloward, developed a revised application based on their newly articulated model of the causes of juvenile delinquency (Cloward and Ohlin, 1960). They asserted that a “lack of conventional opportunity alienated inner-city youth from societal norms and pushed them to adopt the norms [often illegal, sometimes violent] of the street and the gang”—“frustrations caused by unequal opportunity structures [found] in poor communities” (Halpern, 1995, p. 102). At root was gang members’ exclusion from legitimate upward assimilative paths such as education, part-time jobs and school extra-curricular activities. Henry Street’s original proposal was recast into the model, resubmitted and eventually approved. The $12 million program commenced in 1961 (Halpern, 1995, pp. 101–2). Most of MFY’s funds and programs went into conventional services, pre-/after-school programs, youth employment and some training.

More sophisticated than Ylvisaker’s formulations, MFY was compatible with the Gray Area  human  service  framework,  but  it  ventured  into  new  ground.  Instead  of coordinating various social and government bureaucracies through a “neighborhood coordinating entity,” as did Gray Areas, MFY adopted a more bottoms-up approach that meaningfully involved residents and clients in problem identification and resolution. Adults and parents, for example, were part of the process to address issues with schools. These adults in turn were expected to be more involved with their children, potential candidates for juvenile delinquency (Brager and Purcell, 1967). Bureaucracies, being bureaucracies filled with experts, often had a hard time with this involvement, as did the residents. During program implementation, relationships “went south”; MFY staff got caught in the middle, and tended to support the residents (Halpern, 1995, pp. 102–4). Obliquely, the clash of bureaucratic and resident cultures meshed poorly with the Gray Areas approach—even though by this point the Ford Foundation was involved with MFY.

It is at this point (1963) that MFY and Gray Areas “hooked up”—but the arena was not the Ford Foundation, but rather the President’s Commission on Juvenile Delinquency, the Department of Labor, the Bureau of the Budget and a presidential task force. What had happened is that, from separate departments, two key Ford Foundation program directors lobbied federal officials to carry their ideas, and the programs, further. The review and decision was one function of the task force. This is the critical juncture that took these pioneering yet rudimentary initiatives and recast them into community action and, eventually, the War on Poverty. This policy formulation approach—vastly different from that followed by a more open, legislatively focused and decentralized public housing, slum clearance and urban renewal policy process— hints that foundation-led community development may have alternative policy formulation processes that set it apart from both mainstream economic development and other wings of community development. That it did in 1963 is evident in the next section.

Looking Backward Through the Looking Glass: Experts and Bureaucratic Bowels

The task force deliberations overlapped with a changing ED policy environment reacting against municipal-led urban renewal, public housing, interstate highway construction and slum removal/housing demolition, from multiple projects. Felt disproportionately in neighborhoods and ghettos, resulting in destruction of local business, loss of housing units, accelerated neighborhood transition and succession, protests, sit-ins, rent strikes, conflict, even violence, often within schools, were normal events after the early 1950s. Crime and juvenile delinquency were high-visibility policy areas. Active resistance at public meetings against specific urban renewal/highway projects, while not especially impactful, was also commonplace. Jane Jacobs had published The Death and Life of Great American Cities in 1961. The so-called melting pot was boiling over and the Second Ghetto in steroidal development while the policy initiatives below were being formulated.

Early in 1961, Ford Foundation officials, including Ylvisaker and MFY’s director David Hunter,⁶ approached the new Kennedy administration via David Hackett, a boyhood friend of RFK, campaign official and newly assigned special assistant to the Attorney General. After being briefed, principally it seems on the Gray Areas approach, in May 1961 JFK established the President’s Committee on Juvenile Delinquency and Youth Crime (PCJD), chaired by the Attorney General and composed of the secretaries of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW), Labor and, indirectly, the Budget Bureau’s Kermit Gordon. Hackett was staff head and he recruited Lloyd Ohlin, Sanford Kravitz (a prominent social worker and soon to be Chief of Research and Program Development of the Office of Economic Opportunity/OEO’s Community Action Program) and Richard Boone from the Ford Foundation. The staff, referring to themselves as urban guerillas (Vietnam was in vogue), formulated programs, cobbled together funds and, working with the Ford Foundation (and others), set up programs in selected communities to test further the ideas developing in Gray Areas and MFY (Moynihan, 1969, pp. 63–7).

The delinquency programme operated, then through an unstable alliance of Robert Kennedy’s personal authority with internal department rivalries, and the mutual understanding of a small group of idealistic innovators within the bureaucracy … [it] stressed a new coalition of community leadership … intellectual coherence … a proven theory of social rehabilitation. (Marris and Rein, 1967, p. 135)

If Moynihan (a participant) is correct, the PCJD proved to be the “blast furnace” that forged community action and the War on Poverty. Over the next two years, the PCJD experimented with pilot programs, joined in closely with Ford Foundation MFY and Gray Areas and eventually came to several conclusions, including that:

+ The federal government with local governments and private foundations should start programs to attack the problems of youth.

+ Bureaucratic siloization and uncoordinated services required new methods and structures if these problems were to be successfully countered and a critical mass of initiatives assembled sufficient to provide individual and neighborhood change.

+ The root cause of these problems was “poverty,” and success required “concentrated resources on attacks on poverty” on a wide variety of policy areas.

Municipalities, schools and local nonprofit bureaucracies required having their feet held to the fire of consistent, client-centered program administration—and that was best accomplished by embracing citizens and residents themselves in the process of change: “They wished the poor to be involved in the program, but in the interests of therapy as much as anything else … they wanted those who had the power to do something about the suffering and the poverty” (Moynihan, 1969, p. 70). It was as simple and decent as that. This was called “community action.” Gray Areas “comprehensiveness” was incorporated into this approach as necessary to provide the scale and power to break the cycle of poverty. Poverty being the root cause of delinquency, any attack on its symptoms ought to also attack poverty itself.

At this critical juncture, the civil rights movement “turned north”: the August 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom (“I have a dream”)—economic demands were prominent elements in its agenda. Later active in Chicago and other northern cities, organizations such as the NAACP, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the National Urban League (NUL) intensified pressure on northern integration efforts, and urged the hiring of minorities by private companies. The Civil Rights Movement expanded into economic development. In this environment, the policy approach drafted within the PCJD appeared in a Council of Economic Advisors (CEA) staff report, Program for a Concerted Assault on Poverty, on October 29, 1963. The next day CEA’s chair, Walter Heller, wrote the cabinet to submit their proposals so they “might be woven into a basic attack on poverty and waste of human resources as part of the 1964 legislative program” (Moynihan, 1969, p. 79).

A month later Hackett’s PCJD proposal was accepted by the Bureau of the Budget—but by then President John F. Kennedy had been assassinated in Dallas.

 

THE GREAT SOCIETY

Upon entering office, LBJ crafted his domestic program. Calling it “the Great Society,” it was launched in his January 1964 State of the Union Address. Civil rights were his first priority. In July 1964 Congress approved the Civil Rights Act. In July LBJ signed the Urban Mass Transportation Act. LBJ’s second priority was his War on Poverty, also alluded to in the State of the Union Address. In August 1964 he signed the Equal Opportunity Act into law: “Today for the first time in history of the human race a great nation is able and willing to make a commitment to eradicating poverty among its people.” Less than eight months had elapsed since Kennedy’s death.

War on Poverty

LBJ’s War on Poverty smashed through municipal policy systems like a steamroller. The Equal Opportunity Act was only the first legislation in the War on Poverty. In short order, the 1964 Food Stamp Act, the 1965 Social Security Act (creating Medicare and Medicaid) and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act were passed. In no time, it was engaging low-income residents in policy change through community action implemented and financed by the War on Poverty’s new CDO, the Community Action Agency (CAA). Within 18 months nearly 1000 CAAs were established in each decent-sized municipality in the nation. The CAA led the charge for neighborhooddriven policy implementation. Empowered with a host of human, community service and education programs CAA’s potential program arsenal affected nearly every significant neighborhood and city-level institution or agency. The CAA itself did not implement these programs; it funded other CDOs and agencies with pass-through federal monies.

Mostly, CAAs coordinated local Head Start, VISTA, Upward Bound, community health centers, family planning and legal aid. The Job Corps and Neighborhood Youth programs were run out out of the DOL, and Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) out of HEW. In many ways, the CAA story was less these programs and their implementation than their role in the community action empowerment objective. The OEO, headed by Sargent Shriver required CAAs to create boards of directors (and staff) with the “maximum feasible participation” (MFP) of neighborhood residents. While the origins of the phrase maximum feasible participation are still unclear, they wound up in the War on Poverty legislation. The remaking of the community/neighborhood/culture of poverty was not to be engineered from above by bureaucratic rule-making, but from below, by the people in the community. MFP meant action by the community, not for the community. The problems of the community could best be resolved by those within the community who would be empowered to control the institutions of the neighborhood—and the programs financed by the War on Poverty.

MFP meant CAAs “would provide a structure for poor communities to mobilize their own resources on behalf of their residents, and a platform for giving poor people more of a voice in the bureaucratic institutions that shaped their lives” (Halpern, 1995, p. 108).

Whatever else it was supposed to do, MFP unleashed a three-year civil war within most CAAs. Incessant power struggles followed over who was, or was not, to be on the board, between city hall and the board, between the CAA/board and its constituent institutions (school principals, for example). Some suggested it was better to watch sausage being made than to sit in a board meeting. Schools and city hall bureaucracies fared the worst.

It became clear that a personal history of hardship and exploitation did not incline a person to be community-minded … Community residents on the board did not necessarily represent the most disenfranchised segments … but rather a narrow set of interests, notably that of families, friends and allies. (Halpern, 1995, p. 110)

Moynihan (1969) compares CAA internal policy-making to the old machines— concerned with nepotism, services and patronage. Toward the end of 1966, Congress, prodded by mayors, wanted to rein in CAP and establish order and a measure of accountability. LBJ, after two years of complaints, backtracked.

In hindsight the OEO set up a direct funding/program link from the federal government to cities and community organizations—bypassing states and city halls. It was the prototype of Johnson’s creative federalism. Creative federalism was a radical departure from FDR’s cooperative federalism. Cooperative federalism, described as “marble cake” federalism, shared federal powers and program implementation with states; there were no direct federal–local grants. Social security, employment/ unemployment assistance and secondary education were excellent examples of cooperative federalism. Johnson’s Creative federalism, however, ran through categorical grants that bypassed state government and went to selected municipal- or community-based recipients (often as not political opponents of mayors and governors).

During Johnson’s five years more than 200 new categorical grants were created (Bowman and Kearney, 1999, p. 42). This was the famous “picket fence” (silos) that permitted the federal government to directly fund an eligible recipient, requiring the eligible recipient to follow federal regulations and policy priorities. These grants, often very specific in scope, weakened state and local government and empowered their recipient. Creative federalism lasted until Nixon’s 1974 block grants, which flowed through states, returned to business as usual.

The War on Poverty and the SBA

The War on Poverty left a lasting impression on the SBA. Title IV of the Equal Opportunity Act directed SBA to both “advance the Negro in the business world” and to expand its programs (Bean, 2001, p. 47). Title IV funds were linked to community action programs and provided resources for lending to minority businesses (Equal Opportunity Loans). Title IV also mandated establishing Small Business Development Centers (SBDCs) to recruit EOL applicants and provide management assistance. The funds, however, were largely diverted to natural disaster loans (Alaskan earthquake) and satisfy high demand for traditional SBA loans. Only $10 million was spent on EOLs. The SBA’s “banker culture” allegedly inhibited SBA involvement in OEO and community action. Still, by the end of 1965, the SBA had established an SBDC in each of the 35 community action-designed cities (Bean, 2001, p. 49).

The 1965 Watts riots intensified SBA’s involvement in the War on Poverty. SBA director Eugene Foley became the first head of the newly formed Economic Development Administration/EDA (see below). He attempted to merge SBA and EDA, but congressional opposition ended that idea. Foley (in 1964) recruited volunteer retired business executives and formed them into experimental “chapters” in New England. These chapters offered counseling, mentoring and expertise to small business. The innovation was successful, and he expanded it nationwide, so by 1967 there were 3500 SCORE volunteer and institutionalized within SBA. In 2013, there were 348 SCORE chapters and 13,000 counselors.

After Foley’s departure and an interregnum, the new SBA director, Bernard Boutin, conducted a serious reorganization/revitalization of SBA processes. In particular, he revamped the Small Business Investment Company (SBIC) which had imploded in the 1962 stock market crash. An internal investigation uncovered several scandals, including an organized crime money-laundering scheme. Boutin also secured congressional legislation permitting SBICs to expand capacity and size—and to acquire independent expertise for its program implementation. He increased the program’s definition of “small” to include AMC with 30,000 employees. SBIC was “saved,” but its position was precarious and it suffered a rollercoaster-like ride for the next decade. SBIC stagnated as private-venture firms competed with SBICs.

Following Boutin, in 1968 another short-lived director, Howard Samuels, launched the Section 8(a) program for minority contractors. SBA had always been authorized to act as an intermediary (prime contracts) between federal departments and small business, but in 1967 a Defense Department innovator urged SBA to use that authority to “set aside” contracts for minority small business. In 1968 SBA accepted the idea and issued eight prime contracts. The program has subsequently generated its fair share of controversy, but that has not stopped its long-term growth. By 1980, $1 billion in contracts had been issued, and by 1999 nearly $7 billion (Bean, 2001, pp. 143, Appendix B).

Housing Act of 1964

Greatly underappreciated War on Poverty legislation included the Housing Act of 1964, an Act intended to “reform” but also preserve and expand urban renewal. By this time, Martin Anderson’s, The Federal Bulldozer had hit the bookshelves, describing in great detail deficiencies in the federal urban renewal program. Resident reaction, Jane Jacobs, Herbert Gans and anti-Moses sentiment was also pushing back on urban renewal projects. The bloom was indeed off the urban renewal rose. Still, the Housing Act provided $750 million for urban renewal (as opposed to $375 million included in the 1964 Urban Mass Transit Act). It did, however, shift the program away from large-scale blighted neighborhood slum removal to housing rehabilitation and preservation, where feasible, of existing units. The Act directed municipal planners to pay more attention to resident dislocation.

In its place a modified Baltimore Plan, centered on enforcement of health, sanitary and occupancy codes, was included in eligible costs. By 1967, cities would lose UR eligibility if comprehensive plans did not take into account social costs and make available loans for resident rehabilitation. Yet, although all conceded that urban renewal disruption was made worse unless alternate public housing were first built, the Act reduced funding for public housing to 37,500 units (from 50,000). Interestingly, LBJ included a “new towns” initiative with all public services and industry needed to provide jobs, housing and recreation facilities for moderate- and low-income families. This was intended to provide suburban alternatives to the central city ghetto. The section was noticed by Congressmen from suburban districts—and it was not approved.

The War on Poverty/CAP, however, had a serious effect on social service and planning municipal bureaucracies (Lipsky, 1980). Aside from making life generally miserable for public servants, community action and the rising tide of citizen activism challenged the prevailing physical economic development/planning paradigm. As early as spring 1965, architect/urban planner Harvey Perloff—in a milestone presentation “Common Goals and Linking of Physical and Social Planning”—alerted professions to the new world, a world that included social and personal costs associated with programs and plans. There was a need to bring together social and physical planners in a new planning paradigm—the juncture of the two could result in new opportunities that anticipated much of the 1966 Model Cities legislation (Scott, 1969, pp. 606–10). From this point on, planners in particular debated—and struggled—to reconcile its centrality in urban renewal, highways and suburban subdivision development. Over the following decades, a community development form of planning would evolve—and arguably evolve to become planning’s dominant paradigm (incorporating environmentalism and sustainability).

Whatever else it accomplished, the 1964 War on Poverty elevated the federal government to the dominant actor in Big City sub-state urban and economic development policy-making. Not exactly puppets, Big City mayors (and policy systems) in these years were dancing to music not of their own making. In protest many yanked on Washington’s policy strings and demanded to be heard. Also, the War on Poverty had Kennedy fingerprints (RFK’s) all over it, and LBJ, no later than the 1964 election, was moving in his own direction, with his own people. Post-War on Poverty legislative acts arguably constitute the second phase of the Great Society.

LBJ’S “OTHER” GREAT SOCIETY LEGISLATION

There were five major post-War on Poverty ED-related pieces of legislation:

1. the Housing and Urban Development Act of 1965 (creating HUD);
2. the 1965 Appalachian Regional Development Act;
3. the Public Works and Economic Development Act of 1965 (creating EDA);
4. the Demonstration Cities and Metropolitan Development Act of 1966 (Model Cities); and the Housing Act of 1968.

Taken in aggregate, these Acts radically altered the sub-state economic development landscape; legitimized the fledgling community development redefinition; and were critically important elements in the next decade’s reshaping of Big City policy systems. They also exerted considerable impact on economic development professionalization through EDA’s sponsorship of a new professional association: the Council of Urban Economic Development. These legislative Acts:

1. moderated (almost repudiated MFP, for example), but integrated War on Poverty with older mainstream federal economic development;
2. established a federal  home base for future federal  community development leadership; and for future community development leadership, and
3. (eventually) did the same for mainstream physical/infrastructure/urban renewal and business assistance economic development EDA).

The last provided funding for a new set of public departments and agencies that over the next decade increasingly displaced chambers of commerce from their exalted position as lead agency in municipal economic development.

Housing and Urban Development (HUD)

In August 1965 LBJ signed the Housing and Urban Development Act of 1965, which he described as the “single most important breakthrough in housing policy since the 1920s.” Four weeks later, separate legislation created a new cabinet Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) into which were placed most of the housing agencies mentioned in this history. The legislation:

+ greatly expanded financing for most housing programs;

+ added new rent subsidy for the elderly and disabled;

+ provided housing rehabilitation grants to impoverished homeowners and veteran homeowner subsidies;

+ initiated “Section 8” housing;⁷

+ provided matching grants to localities to construct water/sewer facilities, community centers and urban beautification programs in distressed neighborhoods.

Also included were sections calling for more metropolitan planning, especially for water/sewer projects and further encouragement for the formation of metro-wide planning entities such as the Council of Governments. But even this early, suburban Congressional resistance to low-income housing (and the ill-fated LBJ New Towns initiative) led to strong statutes and program innovation—but inadequate funding. Two years of additional funding for urban renewal (at $750 million annually) was also provided. A housing and research entity was also approved—leading in 1968 to the Urban Institute as a private nonprofit.

Appalachian Regional Development Act: the South and Great Society

The 1965 Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) Development District Act, the Appalachian Development Act—creating the Appalachian Regional Commission and sub-state development districts—and OMB-Cir-A-80 (Gray and Johnson, 2005, pp. 66–7)— continued the Kennedy area-wide strategy. HUD and EDA were also included in this 12-state regional planning and development initiative. For some southerners, the aggregation of these Great Society initiatives represented a first-class economic development assault (Schulman, 1994, p. 186). Reality was more complicated.

The South brought this “assault” upon themselves. A 1960 conference of Appalachian governors demanded federal action to address the region’s woes, and the Kennedy administration was sympathetic to the issue. Approved in 1962, ARA undertook a review of the region’s problems. By 1963, ARA assembled a joint federal–state commission composed of representatives of the Appalachian states and federal agencies, chaired by Franklin Roosevelt Jr. The commission’s purpose identified four problem areas:

1. lack of access to, and within, the region;
2. technological inability to efficiently utilize the region’s plentiful natural resources;
3. lack of facilities to control/exploit the abundance of rainfall and channel it for low-cost energy generation; and
4. an inadequately educated and trained workforce.

They called for a coordinated federal/state/local program to address these needs. On April 29, 1964 LBJ submitted to Congress the Appalachian Redevelopment Act, which provided public works, various ED programs and, above all, planning and implementation of a multi-faceted, area-wide redevelopment program. ARA’s programs were viewed by many northern/midwestern Congressmen/Senators as little more than a redistribution of their money to the South—a South that was stealing their jobs, tax base and manufacturing firms. LBJ’s legislation triggered such opposition that the Great Society steamroller, then in full gear, was not equal to the task. ARA failed to be approved in 1964. Resubmitted in 1965, the LBJ juggernaut was victorious, authorizing $1.1 billion. In tandem with ARA, Congress also approved the Public Works and Economic Development Act, which was also intended to play a significant role in Appalachian development. The 12 states welcomed the legislation as an opportunity.

There are several reasons for this southern openness to federal involvement. ARC was from the get-go effectively controlled by its member states. Each state had a voting member on the commission and the federal government was restricted to the two votes of commission co-chairs. Since ARC’s informal mission was allocate the federal largesse, its operation was acceptable to Southern governors, and log-rolling and back-scratching ensured each state’s projects received a speedy ARC approval. Secondly, unlike EDA which distributed its dollars on the basis of need, low income and high unemployment, ARC dispersed funds on “growth potential”—as defined by the affected states. Growth areas often were the state’s more affluent areas. Thirdly, ARC programs were compatible with traditional southern priorities—infrastructure (highways, dams), workforce training and enhanced technology capacity: ARC “never interposed federal administrators between southern governments and their citizens, never built a constituency for direct federal intervention as the TVA and [welfare] programs had” (Schulman, 1994, pp. 186–7).

By funding regional economic development districts throughout the East South Central and South Atlantic census divisions, the federal government created a network of planning, housing, human service, transportation and economic development regional organizations that were a remarkable, arguably page-turning departure from past ED state history. Many persist to this day. Over the next 15 years, ARC program expenditures primarily went to highway construction (estimated 60 percent of total expenditures). Highways opened up isolated areas of the region and, when combined with land stabilization and water drainage programs, garnered the bulk of ARC funds. ARC was an exception to the CD thrust of Great Society programs. EDA however, with its stress on formula-defined distressed communities, meshed poorly with ARC’s focus on affluent growth areas; the two clashed. EDA was perceived as a federal intruder, and its attempts to establish coordination districts ran into considerable difficulty, especially in Kentucky, Tennessee and Georgia where ARC district-led coordination was preferred (Schulman, 1994, p. 188). Confrontation with OEO’s community action programs, however, triggered a lot more controversy and “heat” than EDA.

The 1965 Tennessee Development District Act authorized the “creation of development districts to provide ‘the various counties and cities … general and comprehensive planning and development activities [and make] the maximum use of federal, state and local programs designed to stimulate economic development.”⁸ These ED districts, managed by sub-state EDOs, spread throughout the states. In Alabama, a network of regional Planning and Development Councils were initially authorized in 1963 and further empowered by Governor George Wallace in 1969 and 1971. The network continues to play an important role in Alabama’s ED system. Mississippi, in 1967, first established the Southern Mississippi Planning and Development District. Subsequent federal prodding to extend the district’s authorizing legislation state-wide bogged down—until the passage of the 1968 federal Intergovernmental Cooperation Act’s Circular-A-95. Governor John Bell Williams finally issued Executive Order 81 (July 1971), designating and renaming the existing ten nonprofit corporations as official sub-state regions. Mississippi was one of several states to utilize nonprofit corporations through executive order. To this day Mississippi has neither passed enabling legislation nor appropriated funding for planning and development district operations.⁹ Instead, Mississippi approved its own, ED legislation, the Mississippi Code of 1972, to implement the ARC’s programs. The Mississippi Code set up the structural outline of the state’s current state ED system.

Economic Development Administration (EDA)

The 1965 Public Works and Economic Development Act was intended to replace Kennedy’s Area Redevelopment Administration (ARA) and supplement ARC and TVA. The EDA, housed in the Department of Commerce, was the legislation’s engine. EDA ironically evolved into the de facto “home base” for Big (and Small) City EDOs, the go-to agencies for local mainstream ED professionals interested in infrastructure, physical/central city redevelopment and business assistance to firms—revolving loan funds (RLFs). It didn’t start out that way, however. EDA’s original legislative goals and eligibility criteria (Titles III and IV), centering on jurisdictional job loss and population decline, focused on rural, area-wide economic development.

The EDA mandate was similar to that of the ARA … conceived as a depressed area agency with a rural focus, have a supply-side orientation, contain minor countercyclical provisions, and increase [federal] government’s role in supplying infrastructure to lagging areas.¹⁰

Johnson intended EDA to counter the flow of rural population to the central cities—by stimulating the depressed areas through enhanced infrastructure and business development, urban migration could be slowed:

If we ignore people in distressed rural areas we make certain that thousands upon thousands of families will be compelled to move away and go into the great cities. And when they get there, they are going to be concentrated in slums; they are going to live on the edge of poverty.¹¹

EDA grants (50 percent match required) could be obtained by state or local governments after development of a comprehensive economic development strategy/plan. Eligibility was limited to areas with persistently high unemployment and disproportionate low-income population or economic adjustment resulting from “severe changes in economic conditions.” As LBJ wrote, “There is little hope of establishing new industry in an area which does not have the public works and development facilities to support industrial growth.” There was no legislative mention of cities and “urban” areas. The muscle in the Act (Titles III and IV) was oriented toward the formation of area-wide economic development districts, with a primary focus on Appalachia.

EDA, as described above, had a rough go in Appalachia. Internally, the agency leadership pursued a strategy to redirect itself away from ARC and rural areas to an urban mission. Between 1967 and 1978, EDA empowered its regional offices and developed close ties with economic developers in each region. Earlier, behind-the scenes EDA officials met with urban economic development officials to encourage them to involve themselves with EDA and to support legislatively EDA’s redirection. In fairly short order, Big City economic developers formed a professional association, the Council of Urban Economic Development (CUED), and sustained itself with EDA support and financial assistance (see below). With CUED’s close involvement, EDA developed legislative support and a track record in urban economic development.

EDA’s central place in urban affairs would take a few years to evolve. A permanent redirection was only achieved by adding Title IX in 1974.

Council of Urban Economic Development

EDA’s top leadership assigned its chief of urban projects, Andy Bennett, to develop an urban constituency and a non-rural role for EDA. To this end, through the late 1960s EDA played the role of godfather to what became the Council of Urban Economic Development (CUED). CUED’s midwife was Ed de Luca, head of Baltimore’s Development Corporation, who, informally encouraged by Bennett, on February 10, 1966 sent a letter to 20 Big City mayors and their development chiefs inviting them to Baltimore to brainstorm.¹² The letter’s opening lines exposed the motivation behind this initiative (deindustrialization/suburbanization) and those behind it (Big City mayors and their young ED czars): “A few weeks ago you expressed interest in the formation of the ‘HUB CLUB’ which we proposed as a concerted effort by cities to combat the loss of industry to suburbs” (Kysiak, 1992, p. 4).

In 1966, in the midst of what would be five years of central city riots, few had any doubts the exodus of business from central city to suburbs was going to accelerate even more dramatically. Something had to be done. In response to the February 1966 letter, Big City economic developers from 15 cities arrived in Baltimore, all paid for and coordinated by de Luca.¹³ There followed a series of meetings (Washington, Pittsburgh and Chicago) over the next year. In April 1967 the Helping Urban Business Council (HUB) was officially incorporated in Milwaukee. By that time, additional cities such as Toledo had joined the group.

Like AEDC in its formative years, HUB restricted its membership to cities of over 250,000; in fairly short order the population requirement was reduced to 100,000. By 1967, 15 cities had joined. HUB’s central mission was to address the “industrial and commercial problems of the central cities, with a major emphasis on industrial development” (Kysiak, 1992, p. 5). In its earliest years the “cult of manufacturing” was an integral strand of HUB’s DNA. The initial laundry list of programmatic priorities included tax incentives, downtown/CBD redevelopment, preserving industrial land, incubators, manpower and “negro entrepreneurship.” In 1968 EDA funded a two-year grant to HUB (the first of a series through the 1970s; the first HUD grant came late in the 1970s) and an executive director was hired. By 1969, 21 cities had joined HUB and its first annual conference was held in Philadelphia. In 1970 executive offices were moved to Philadelphia.

The move to Philly, however, was short-lived as:

1. HUB became convinced a strong presence in Washington DC was needed to acquire the Nixon administration’s support for urban, central city involvement.
2. The organization’s name was changed to the Council of Urban Economic Development (CUED).
3. The headquarters—with a new executive director, founding member Ken Fry from Milwaukee—was moved to DC where it remains to this day.

By 1972, CUED had about 150 members and a second EDA grant. Early CUED priorities were technical assistance to its members (including on site), networking and, above all, “making its presence known to Congress” (Kysiak, 1992, p. 6). CUED during the Nixon administration, however, could not access or consistently affect its decision-making while maintaining support of a Democratic Congress.

AEDC during this period also was active—but in a substantially different fashion. In 1964, with headquarters in Boston, the first class of the Industrial Development Institute graduated 19 economic developers. In 1966 the first issue of its journal, the AIDC, was published and membership exceeded 1000. In 1967 the first accredited “Basic Industrial Development” course was held at Texas A&M University, and in 1968 three such courses (intended for American Indians) were held at Arizona State University. In that year, the first survey of member activities and salaries was released: The Industrial Development Practitioner: Profile and Study. AIDC’s crowning achievement in this period, however, was its 1971 establishment of the profession’s first certification program, its first certified developer exam from which 58 developers were certified. In 1973 the headquarters moved to Kansas City (Shelton et al., 2001, pp. 28–9).

By 1970 economic development has developed two separate professional organizations. AIDC and CUED were not only separate, they were also quite different in their membership, functions and priorities, and in their core mission as professional associations. AEDC continued its inward focus on networking and developing the skills of its members in the practice of their profession; its more open enrollment made it eight times larger than CUED. Its publication tied its membership to economic development, and its development of a curriculum for a basic introductory course in economic development, followed by a professional certification program, meant that it had developed a body of knowledge reflective of its approach to economic development.

CUED’s priority was to maintain a focus by an activist federal government on economic development. Its technical assistance programs, for the most part, were intended to assist members in developing programs whose purpose was to retain central city manufacturing—firms that were targets of industrial recruitment by AIDC members. Tension between the two organizations was constant. The irony in all this was that both organizations, so different in their conception of economic development and their inception 40 years apart, had developed from leadership provided by the city of Baltimore. The difference in their godfather organizations was quite telling: AIDC the US Chamber of Commerce; CUED, the Economic Development Administration.

HUD and Model Cities

It started in the spring of 1964 when LBJ selected Dr Robert C. Wood (Chapter 14’s conflicted suburbanite) to head a series of task forces intended to generate ideas and programs for federal involvement in urban affairs. Their recommendations produced much of the legislation discussed in the remainder of the chapter. The influence of these task force members is further enhanced by the subsequent appointment of several, including Wood, to HUD leadership.

By 1966, with riots increasing, the Vietnam War polarizing the nation, civil rights picking up steam and obvious disruption triggered by the War on Poverty, LBJ was reluctant to jump headlong into some bold, expensive, hard-to-digest initiative. Rather, he was inclined toward the Task Force on Urban Problems’ suggestion that HUD test a number of ideas, experiment with lots of approaches, by funding each in a “demonstration city.” Given the large number of “demonstrations” evident in most urban areas, the legislation that followed this suggestion was renamed “Model Cities.” Unique to Great Society legislation was the “core strategy concept” (Olken, 1971). Each city by plan had to identify its specific problems, set goals/objectives and develop its own strategy to achieve these goals. As described, its eligible objectives, following Gray City comprehensiveness, were sufficiently broad to encompass a wide variety of policy areas that could be included within a local economic development strategy. Model Cities defined the low-income neighborhood as the level of its investment, so a municipalwide strategy was not eligible.

The Demonstration Cities and Metropolitan Redevelopment Act of 1966, was, from our perspective, a consolidation of War on Poverty innovations moderated by the widespread criticism and outright opposition it had engendered. It authorized for five years, but weakened, the OEO’s low-income, community-action approach; instead there was a decided movement toward bricks and mortar. Perloff’s earlier idea, to combine the social and physical, best described its approach. Model Cities required its own organizational form: the City Demonstration Agency (CDA), composed of elected officials, representatives of major agencies and business leaders. CDA actions could be nullified by mayor or city council. Model Cities thus tempered the OEO’s MFP community action nexus—and strengthened oversight and mayoral “direction” over program initiatives. CAAs had to make their peace with local government. Many disappeared; others adjusted.

Model Cities cemented Gray Areas comprehensiveness into Great Society/HUD-style community development. Title I outlined that:

an adequate program for a model neighborhood should … expand housing, increase job and income opportunities, reduce dependence on welfare, improve educational facilities and programs, combat disease and ill health, reduce the incidence of crime and delinquency, enhance recreational and cultural opportunities, establish better access between home and jobs, and in general improve living conditions. (Scott, 1969, p. 622)

Not surprisingly, critics complained that it “gilded the ghetto”—it encouraged separateness and discouraged assimilation and integration. HUD’s first cabinet secretary, Robert C. Weaver, argued to the contrary, that through Model City programs ghettos will be the stepping stone to assimilation: “Physical, social and economic planning will be combined to fit the residents of blighted districts to participate more effectively in urban life, and someday to live wherever they can afford the housing costs” (Scott, 1969, pp. 632–3). That was not the last word on the subject.

The second policy thrust of Model Cities was something called “metropolitan development.” In a simple way, metropolitan development brings us back to the ultimate causes of nearly all the slum/blight clearance, public housing, CBD-urban renewal, Big City economic development and the Great Society programs—how to counter suburbanization. HUD’s answer in Model Cities was “area-wide planning,” redefined into now-required metropolitan plans (Section 204) complete with input from a metropolitan entity (council of government, metropolitan planning group or area-wide government). If cities (now meaning metro areas) didn’t create these entities, no federal money. It worked while it worked—but when Model Cities went away so did many of these entities.

The legislation authorized for cities of all sizes grants to plan and implement comprehensive city demonstration programs to rebuild or restore entire sections or neighborhoods of slum and blighted areas by the concentrated and coordinated use of all available federal aids together with local, private and governmental resources. The number of demonstration cities was increased from 75 to 150 (without any increase in funding), testifying again to the almost inevitable “spreading” in economic development; 193 cities submitted applications. Almost immediately urban riots intensified—71 cities had major riots that year. Responding to pressure, HUD in November awarded its first round of grants to 63 cities and towns (a Big City bias in funding was evident). Identical phenomena occurred in 1968: lots more riots followed by a second round of funding (Goldfield, 2007, p. 485).

By this point Congress had approved the Housing Act of 1968, which, if one reads its provisions, ought to have been the capstone of the Great Society. That honor, however, probably goes to Model Cities. In a horrendously polarized election year, Congress overwhelmingly approved it—and then refused to fund much of it.

National Historic Preservation Act of 1966

The Historic Sites, Buildings and Antiquities Act of 1935 marked the formal entry of the federal government in historic preservation. Administered by the Park Service, it funneled New Deal funds to combat the Depression through work projects and construction. The effort abated during the war, but in 1947 private citizens through the National Council for Historic Sites and Buildings pressed for a more permanent federal role. Its success resulted in Congress in 1949 chartering the National Trust for Historic Preservation (a nonprofit that linked government, the Park Service and private citizens). The 1966 Historic Preservation Act, however, institutionalized historic preservation by creating the National Registry of Historic Places.

The Act precluded the use of tax incentives to demolish historic structures, buildings and even neighborhoods which could be classified as historic districts (the Fells Point neighborhood in Baltimore qualified as a historic preservation area, and in 1969 stopped I-83 from going through its neighborhood). Tax incentives for rehabilitation were also authorized. One of the more famous uses of this legislation occurred in 1979 with qualification of the Miami Beach Architectural District—the first district entirely composed of twentieth-century buildings—based on its distinctive Art Deco South Beach architecture. Historic Preservation was further expanded by the 1974 Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) Act (Goldfield, 2007, pp. 331–3).

RIOTS

The riots began in 1964, triggered by any number of specific events and acts that captured the cumulative inequalities, chronic discrimination, and day-to-day frustrations of living in predominantly black, Great Migration, central city ghettos. Harlem, Rochester, Jersey City, Elizabeth and Philadelphia erupted in 1964. Watts rioted with serious loss of life in 1965, becoming the poster child (later shared with Detroit). In 1966 Chicago, Cleveland, Atlanta and San Francisco experienced significant destruction, with the inevitable media exploitation. Tampa, Buffalo, Newark and Detroit blew up in 1967 in what was now an expected and increasingly destructive annual expectation. In 1968 the nation exploded. Fueled by Martin Luther King’s April assassination and Robert Kennedy’s assassination in June, an estimated 120 cities disintegrated into a cascade of urban violence, destruction and death. Riots were especially brutal, long-lasting and heart-breaking in Detroit, Baltimore and Washington DC. Residents still remember them with great emotion. To cap it all, as the Democratic National Convention deliberated, Chicago imploded—and America watched day and night on TV.

Using sociologist Seymour Spilerman’s definition of race riot, 752 riots occurred between 1964 and 1971, with 228 deaths, 12,741 injured, 69,099 arrested and 16,000 arson attacks. The peak year was 1968 (289 riots); 44 percent of the deaths occurred in just three riots—Detroit, Watts and Newark (McDonald, 2008, p. 149). The 1967 federal Kerner Commission reported in March 1968: “Our Nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.” It blamed riots specifically on racial discrimination in employment, education, welfare, housing and policing—and concluded that the riots were anomic, unplanned, rapidly escalating disruptions that hurt overwhelmingly African-Americans. Almost totally, the looting, arson and disruption was in black neighborhoods.¹⁴ Subsequent research revealed that between 1960 and 1980 these neighborhoods lost one-third of their populations: Cleveland’s declined by 65 percent, but Los Angeles (Watts) lost only 1 percent (McDonald, 2008, p. 153).

The question of how these riots affected the practice and policy of economic development in the following years is an important background element in the chapters that follow. Neighborhoods needed repair; some demolition/rebuilding did follow. In many cities, however, reconstruction was painfully slow—visible reminders of these years persisted for decades. The effect on people, obviously, was often profound and long-lasting. Suburbanization increased dramatically after the riots—and urban investment plummeted. The shock that hit Big City policy systems was transformative; policy agendas shifted dramatically, as did politics and political leadership.

A final, subtle, legacy of the riots was their effect on subsequent policy-making political culture. Economic development policy-making can be deeply affected by “stories” (Stone, 2002, pp. 133–4) each policy actor brings into the policy process. The riots, dramatic and destructive as they were, became essential elements of many stories held by policy actors—not to mention the stories prevalent among residents, voters and taxpayers. Almost certainly these stories continue to affect contemporary sub-state economic development policy.

 

NIXONIAN THERMIDOR

Nixon won in 1968—an election in which one candidate (RFK) and Martin Luther King were assassinated. Vietnam War protests and summer riots continued; Chicago’s Democratic convention/riot left the nation stunned, and fearful. Both houses of Congress remained Democrat. Nixon won by a plurality (43.5 percent), with 301 electoral votes (Humphrey 43 percent, 191 electoral); George Wallace won five Deep South states with 13.5 percent of the total vote/45 electoral. Wallace unhinged the southern Democratic Party, triggering a southern state Republican realignment. Republicans won 62 percent of governorships. Nixon’s 1972 presidential election was a landslide, exceeding Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 landslide.

New Federalism

Nixon could have attempted to repudiate the Great Society. He didn’t. With Congress Democratic, Nixon chose to consolidate programs but, counter-intuitively, also extended the federal government into environmental policy, creating the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) through the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and the 1972 Clean Water Act. As controversial as President Nixon proved to be, this history views his non-Watergate domestic activities as reshaping, even extending, certainly not repudiating, the Great Society. Nixon pressed for a “New Federalism” (Conlan, 1998), restoring the traditional balance between federal and state uprooted by Great Society’s Creative Federalism (Nathan, 2013). New Federalism meant creating ten regional federal councils to coordinate national programs and simplify regulations. Cornerstones of the New Federalism were revenue-sharing and block grants. Nixon’s New Federalism produced a mixed reaction and a mixed bag of legislation—complicated by a Watergate-troubled presidency in his last two years in office. He resigned, of course, in 1974 and Vice-President Ford became President through 1976.

Nixon’s reshaping of federalism directly affected economic development. Creative Federalism rested upon categorical grants bypassing state government to go directly to municipal/community-based recipients. Nixon’s New Federalism (1) combined many categorical grants into one “block” grant which (2) ran through the states and which (3) allowed the states meaningful discretion in its distribution (despite the existence of a formula) and administration (Finegold, 2004). There were three major block grants in the Nixon–Ford years, and economic development was caught up in two of them: the Housing and Community Development Act and the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA).

The 1972 State and Local Fiscal Assistance Act established the core revenue-sharing program, in many ways the heart of Nixon’s New Federalism (Reagan ended it). Revenue sharing was not important as a funding source for ED; in its first two years, ED received a whopping 2.2 percent allocation from eligible jurisdictions (Judd, 1984, p. 344, Table 11.5). The significance of revenue sharing was empowerment of states/ localities and a step back by the federal government.

Comprehensive Employment and Training Act

CETA was then, and the Workforce Investment Act of 1998 (WIA) remains today, the nation’s cornerstone manpower/skills training/trade adjustment, one-stop youth workforce program. It funds, at least partially, over 500 specialized workforce EDOs throughout the nation. CETA interfaced with educational systems, and offered productivity/training for business. Building on the “unemployment-oriented” Employment Act of 1946, the “education-oriented” GI Bill (1958) and Kennedy’s MDTA “structural” unemployment, skills deficiencies and occupational/trade displacement, CETA responded to a structural employment crisis induced by global technological changes by retraining “dislocated” workers transitioning from one sector to another. CETA evolved into the nation’s answer to deindustrialization (Comprehensive Employment and Training Act A-58, 1977).

Workforce programs such as these are a departure from the traditional “Go West Young Man” manpower program long practiced in the United States (Clague and Kramer, 1976). Restated, that cute expression translates into “get a job somewhere else.” People mobility has been America’s default structural unemployment program, as the Southern Diaspora testifies. All sorts of specific programs existed previous to CETA. Kennedy’s MDTA was the contemporary workforce’s pioneer legislation that targeted four objectives: counter labor shortages in key industry sectors; provide opportunities for the unemployed; upgrade labor force skills to render them more competitive; and provide an avenue out of poverty (Levitan and Mangum, 2003). Also, on-the-job, institutional, classroom-based instruction, remedial instruction, curricula design and some placement were handled through DOL and contracts with local vendors, community agencies and institutions. By 1970 estimates were DOL managed over 10,000 such contracts. Between 1962 and 1964, about 100,000 workers participated annually.

The 1964 War on Poverty launched the Jobs Corps, the Neighborhood Youth Corps, Operation Mainstream, Adult Basic Education, the Work Experience Program, Public Service and New Careers Program; and, through Senator Kennedy’s Special Impact legislation (1966), the Concentrated Employment Program (CEP). About 65 percent of those served in these programs were low income. Another Great Society Program, Opportunities Industrialization Centers (OICs), started in 1964 but operated by special funding to nonprofit corporations accessible to low-income unemployed African-Americans. The Work Incentive Program (or WIN) operated out of the Social Security Administration, providing supportive services such as day care, social and medical assistance, and some skills and job training to those on public assistance. By 1967, an estimated 17 categorical programs existed in these workforce programs. Among other programs it funded, the CEP issued contracts to CAAs to coordinate this mélange of initiatives within their target areas—82 CAAs received these CEP contracts.¹⁵

DOL fragmentation and coordination were serious concerns; several administrative solutions were attempted, notably the Cooperative Area Manpower Planning System (CAMPS). CAMPS funded states (governors specifically) to set up area-wide planning/ advisory committees; in 1970 mayors were funded to do the same. By 1973, over 400 area-wide or local CAMPS committees were in place, each state had a “manpower planning council” and more than 1200 full- and part-time positions were funded with CAMPS dollars. In 1972 their composition was mandated and enlarged to include local elected officials, business and labor leaders and institutions. They “supposedly” were entrusted with making recommendations to chief elected officials on manpower funding and programmatic matters. Mayors and governors became in the process the chief coordinators of this manpower/workforce nexus. Whether any of this worked as was intended is unknown, but one might be skeptical. CAMPS served as the foundation for CETA.

Nixon’s Workforce Initiatives

Nixon’s 1969 Manpower Training Act proposed consolidating categorical programs into a New Federalism block grant. Winners and losers battled it out in Congress, along with Big Cities that feared they would not fare well competing with suburbs and second-tier cities. The legislation was defeated in 1971. A new bill was filed with manpower one of “six special revenue-sharing proposals” in an omnibus multi-policy area bill (the Manpower Revenue Sharing Act). Congress, it was said, reacted with hostility and apathy—which seem hard to combine—and so in 1973 the Nixon administration carved out a third special manpower bill, based upon existing presidential authority to oversee ongoing programs and offering locals a carrot by decentralizing manpower decision-making to the CAMPS planning councils. So we backed into the CETA framework.

Through a formula, about 70 percent of the appropriation went to the chief local elected officials (CLEOs) and governors where CAMPS did not exist for allocation to manpower programs. Nixon’s bold action finally got Congress motivated, and compromise produced a final bill that passed in 1973. What emerged was a hybrid block, revenue-sharing, categorical grant omnibus, fairly decentralized, federally financed workforce system. Most first-level decision-making and allocation of funds (compliant with federal guidelines and objectives du jour) was made by local/state “Prime Sponsors.” Accordingly, who would approve Prime Sponsors (the legislation was silent) became the next battleground. Governors wanted in, so did mayors; debate and compromise followed (Davidson, 1974). Congress approved the bill on December 20, 1973; eight days later Nixon signed the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act of 1973 (barely).

So what had tumbled out of this washer/dryer policy-making? Title I (consolidated 17 categorical grants) created a block grant to Prime Sponsors (either state or local government CLEOs) for a variety of manpower tools/programs (training programs, employment services, testing, counseling, placement and supportive services—the whole shebang). There was no required matching. Cities and counties (or consortiums) greater than 100,000 could become Prime Sponsors. The CAMPS planning council was used by CLEOs to operate/administer funds. To receive funds a comprehensive plan had to be approved. The Prime Sponsor determined the mix and allocation to the various eligible alternatives. Funds were allocated among Prime Sponsors through a formula based on: (1) previous funding level; (2) number unemployed; and (3) the number of low-income (with various set asides at the state level for vocational education and state-level manpower services). The Job Corps survived. With nips and tucks, ebbs and flows, this structural framework endures to the present—through JTPA, WIA and now the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA).

1974 Housing and Community Development Act

The 1970 Housing and Urban Development Act, a creature of Congress, continued most 1968 Housing Act and Model Cities programs. Model Cities, rent supplements, rental housing and public housing funding increased. One interesting innovation was that the Urban Growth and New Communities Act picked up LBJ’s earlier “dream” to build new (suburban) towns, dispersing African-Americans throughout the metro area, deconcentrating ghettos. Consensus within black ghettos, however, had moved away from assimilation to separate neighborhoods controlled by residents. The Act created a Community Development Corporation with $500 million to guarantee debt by public and private developers (Smookler, 1975).

Between 1970 and 1973, HUD was hit with a series of major scandals—chiefly involving Sections 235 (homeownership) and 236 (rental housing). In 1973 an even worse scandal reached into the FHA and several other HUD programs. The poor were sold sub-standard, excessively priced, over-appraised homes by real estate speculators. Granting FHA insurance to Section 235/236 bordered on fraud, and HUD’s administrative competence was seriously questioned. Nixon announced a moratorium on HUD spending until studies, audits and analyses could be conducted (Sullivan, 1979, pp. 389–91). By 1974, with Nixon leaving office, the stage was set for a fundamental re-pivot of HUD and the nation’s housing programs. The result was the 1974 Community Development Block Grant Act (CDBG), signed by President Ford, taking effect in 1975.

The 1974 Act, built around Nixonian block grant, revenue-sharing and administrative decentralization, established the present-day Community Development Block Grant, funding it at $7.9 billion. Combining seven categorical grants distributed by formula to eligible grantees (including states, municipalities), the HUD block grant included economic development programs such as historic preservation, revolving loan funds, fair housing and urban renewal. The key control was the Housing Assistance Plan required of recipients. Decentralization of decision-making and local administrative flexibility were key objectives—as was limiting the role of the federal government in public housing.

The Act pivoted the federal government away from public housing projects and landlord role for the nation’s poor into Section 8 housing. Section 8 provided direct rent subsidies to low-income recipients that covered gaps between the rent able to be paid by the recipient and the privately owned rental unit rate. This pivot from public housing marked the end of CD’s long-standing and controversial CD public houser housing movement. The Age of Urban Renewal and Public Housing was over! Section 8 offered a new tool for Community Development Corporations, which now worked with private developers to construct low-income housing in depressed, low-income neighborhoods—while at the same time permitting (indeed, later requiring) middleclass neighborhoods and suburban communities to house low-income families and individuals. Section 8, with its strengths and weaknesses, continues to this day as the cornerstone housing policy of the nation. CDBG authorized staff/administrative cost reimbursement, fostering growth in sub-state CDCs/EDOs.

Historic Preservation Act of 1976

This Act partnered the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) with the National Park Service to create a historic preservation tax incentive program appropriate to private restoration of historic properties, often in partnership with State Historic Preservation Offices (SHPOs).¹⁶ The legislation provides public subsidy to properties that are incomeproducing so long as they are listed on the National Register and rehabilitated according to Department of Interior standards. Since 1976, the Act has leveraged more than $33 billion in private sector investment in over 32,000 historic properties, creating about 185,000 housing units, of which 75,000 are low–moderate (Ryberg-Webster, 2014).

EDA Changes its Stripes

EDA couldn’t sit still during the seventies—six legislative acts were approved in the decade. Congress added three new titles that established EDA as a home for mainstream urban physical redevelopment and business assistance ED to counterbalance HUD as the home base for community development. CUED was no small part of that. Lost to history was an agency formerly dedicated to rural ED. No consensus existed in Congress as to what role the federal government should play in sub-state mainstream business assistance and physical redevelopment. That was really nothing new—with periodic exceptions, the policy area has been conflict-ridden since the National Highway and canal-building days. Many believed the feds could accomplish very little outside of infrastructure (and macroeconomic policy), except distort the marketplace. Since FDR, however, Congress (and JFK) had argued for a comprehensive program to combat distress in severely distressed and depressed areas. The Great Society in 1965 created the Economic Development Administration to support, through physical development and infrastructure, the Appalachian Regional Commission’s efforts to reduce rural area-wide poverty and economic distress.

The six legislative acts between 1965 and 1975 refocused EDA away from that function, and moved it into the federal vehicle used to:

provide direct assistance to urban areas … address issues confronting communities experiencing sudden and abrupt economic dislocation caused by factory shutdowns, foreign competition, base closures, and disasters … [provide] anti-recessionary [funding] … for public works projects as a means of creating jobs and priming the economic pump. (Boyd, 2011)

In hindsight, the “toe-in-the-door” refocusing legislative act was a 1971 EDA amendment, vetoed by Nixon that somehow got included in another legislative bill to extend EDA through 1973. That legislation was approved and signed. Nixon never supported EDA. He usually included some statement with his signing, asserting EDA or its programs did not create jobs for the poor, overlapped with other federal programs and should spend more effort on rural areas.

The 1971 two-year extension also included a previously vetoed bill creating “special impact areas” as eligible for Title I programs. In fact 25 percent of EDA’s Title I funding was tied to these areas, defined as areas with large concentrations of low-income households, high or abrupt increases in unemployment, such as the closure of a factory—all of which applied to urban as well as rural areas. The legislation encouraged short-term job-creating projects as well as EDA’s original goal to produce long-term ED benefit for distressed areas. These additions were included in new legislation extending EDA for two years (until 1976), signed by Nixon because his bill, the Rural and Urban Community Development Revenue Sharing Act, had gotten nowhere. In 1974 Nixon proposed that EDA address the needs of local areas affected by natural disasters. Congress agreed and approved the Disaster Relief Act of 1974 that added a new title. The disaster relief initiatives included authorization to capitalizing RLFs to help businesses access capital. This turned out to be one of EDA’s most helpful and utilized programs.

Overriding a Ford veto, Congress in 1976 approved the Public Works Employment Act that enlarged EDA involvement in public works as job-creating projects. In the same year, Congress also passed amendments to EDA’s basic legislation, extending it through 1979, making explicit its ability to operate in urban as well as rural areas. The 1976 amendments liberalized several EDA programs, reducing local match, making eligible private sector costs like interest on loan guarantees an interest-free loans to redevelopment areas (urban renewal) to facilitate land acquisition and redevelopment. They also required newly elected President Carter to convene a White House Conference of Balanced National Growth and Economic Development (held from January 29 to February 2, 1978). The report from that conference called for no new federal programs, rather for more effective government and a “real” partnership among levels of government and the private sector.

Carter was also unable to secure permanent funding for EDA in 1979—he did secure legislation extending it through 1982; but no permanent reauthorization of Congress occurred until 1998. EDA survived on periodic legislation that extended its funding for a few more years. Said and done, it took EDA 33 years to achieve permanent status as a federal agency.

SBA

During the Nixon years, SBA started its successful Small Business Institute program (SBI-1970) by reaching agreements with four professional organizations to provide counseling to small business. This was quickly extended by 1975 to include over 400 colleges and universities, 20,000 students and 8000 firms (Bean, 2001, p. 83). SBI offered education-based expertise from business students and advisors to small companies. In 1996 it became independent of SBA, continuing to this day self-funded, complete with a journal and annual conference. Conversely, a Nixonian initiative to transfer the successful SCORE program to ACTION (Allegheny Council to Improve Our Neighborhoods) generated a four-year struggle with the volunteer-based program, culminating in SCORE’s establishment of its own nonprofit in 1975. SCORE would be independent, but coordinated through the SBA. Given SBA’s alleged long-standing indifference to SCORE, in the long run this may have been a positive.

THE GREAT SOCIETY: LAST THOUGHTS

The Great Society, including its Nixonian Thermidor, was a game-changer for sub-state ED—and a revolution for community development. It left a “permanent” legacy in the form of a substantial nexus of federally funded local CDOs/EDOs operating in most communities/regions in the nation: literally thousands of workforce (CETA)-related Prime Sponsors, a greatly expanded SBA and Nixon’s EPA and clean water initiatives. Great Society programs fostered emerging government departments/offices through HUD and EDA funding; created networks of regional planning/economic development entities, mostly in the South but also A-95 and metropolitan clearing houses that fostered regional planning—and, of course, the controversial CAP and its successor neighborhood level CDOs. Left behind was industrial decentralization.

The physical landscape of American sub-state economic development has never been so dramatically enlarged in so short a time. During these years the federal government injected a programmatic and financial pipeline directly into most American jurisdictions. Buried under this avalanche was classic chamber-based ED. Most ED/CD eyes and grant applications were fixed on Washington. Through block grants the federals had roused (and fed) the state beast, and it too took more notice of sub-state ED.

The nearly four-decade-old slum clearance, public housing/urban renewal CD/ED strategy juggernaut intended to preserve Big City metro hegemony was, for all practical purposes, redirected to “softer,” more people-focused neighborhood-based empowerment—and CBD-related revitalization. Public housing was effectively abandoned in favor of neighborhood-based CDO and private housing redevelopment—and individual Section 8 vouchers for privately owned housing. In its wake, the Great Society had not simply rejuvenated American community development; it had actually forged an updated community development that accommodated the Second (and Third) Ghetto. The explosion of CD strategies and tools has added a robustness to the profession it formerly lacked. A Policy World network and an enhanced CD-foundation complex had formed as well.

Of course, the Great Society did not single-handedly “create” contemporary economic development. Rather, it was a shotgun whose programmatic discharges flew in any number of directions—from southern sub-state ED policy systems to Big City inner neighborhoods, periphery suburbs, to the formation of intended and unintended wings of a new contemporary community development. Its short, profound and widely dispersed disruption—accompanied by the fury, confusion and dynamic reaction it unleashed—revealed to us all that the “page of history” was turning. By 1974, American economic development looked very different from how it did a decade earlier.

As for the riots. The Great Society did not “cause” the riots. Big City upheaval had been brewing for some time, awaiting critical mass and a crack in the system. The Great Society knocked down the Big City’s municipal policy system’s house of cards. It cracked open local policy systems, and into the gap poured the activism and resentment inspired by unsettling population movements and generational cohort change. It coincided with the loudest civil rights crescendo and the soon-to-be evident implosion of the northern/midwestern hegemony. Timing is everything they say.

NOTES

1. EDA Legislative History, p. 7 (www.eda.gov). For a comprehensive list of ARA concerns, see pp. 9–10.
2. Compromise with northern legislators permitted business loans to be used for “venture capital,” which in 1961 meant relocated firms (no doubt from the North). In late 1962, as a response to a recession, the Administration tried to expand ARA with public works programs to relieve unemployment; it was blocked because it “gave unfair competitive advantages to certain enterprises and regions” and would prompt “area relocations.”
3. The “spreading” effect characteristic of many targeted ED programs was a significant failing, criticized by northerners who stressed ARA’s susceptibility as a campaign tool.
4. Cobb cites Jeanne Patterson, The Local Industrial Development Corporation (Bloomington: Indiana University, Bureau of Business Research, 1967).
5. For example Connor (1996); Halpern (1995, pp. 89–101); Domhoff (2014).
6. Hunter would be a pall-bearer for RFK seven years later.
7. Section 8 of the Community Development Block Grant Act of 1974 renamed the program established in 1965 (Section 236, Leased Housing Program) and greatly expanded it.
8. State of Tennessee, Office of Attorney General, Opinion No. 09-126.
9. Report #372 to the Mississippi Legislation, January 5, 1998.
10. EDA Legislative History, pp. 13–14. file:///C:/Users//Downloads/eda_legislative_history.pdf.
11. Quoting LBJ in EDA, Legislative History, p. 14.
12. Kysiak, a friend of the Curmudgeon, was employed by de Luca and was a valued participant during these early years. We rely on his publication as well as on informal emails and conversations. De Luca subsidized the early HUB Club from departmental funds.
13. Drawn from Baltimore, Milwaukee, Jersey City, Chicago and Cleveland—all public sector development officials—accompanied by a representative (Andy Bennett) from EDA.
14. National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (1968).
15. Comprehensive Employment and Training Act A-58, 1977, pp. 3–5.
16. achp.gov/docs/BRAC/Federal_Historic_Preservation_Tax_Incentives_Program-June_06.pdf.