Boomers & Progeny: It Depends on What Growth Is? Of recent years, generational cohort mobility has focused on Generation X and Richard Florida’s “Rise of the Creative Class” (Florida, 2003) but before they came along there were the boomers. In the Seventies/Eighties the baby-boomers in their early/middle twenties (1970’s) exacted a huge impact on economic development—they did it by redefining growth. Growth, a noted previously, was heretofore the core of what American economic and community development were about. Questions concerning growth’s definition, however, assumed a great importance during the 1950’s when poverty (inequality) was rediscovered. The rise of community development also redefined growth by urging inclusion of groups left out of it. CD as a strategy of income redistribution and identity politics was an ED response, largely affecting low-income distressed neighborhoods in Big Cities and the rising Sunbelt. The entry into society (and economy) of the baby-boom generation in the Seventies, however, produced a serious assault on growth’s definition.
In particular, boomers who moved into the Sunbelt pressured the establishment to change growth’s definition to fit their environmentalist/quality of life concerns–and, in some locations advanced issues today associated with “identity” (race/ethnicity, feminism and sexual). The first redefined the “what” of growth, the latter the “who”. Neighborhood level was home base. On the fringes of Sunbelt cities/suburbs boomers challenged the dominant business/CBD growth nexus (Abbott’s “neo-progressives”) discussed in Chapter 15. This is when “anti” or “slow” growth first appeared—when “growth management” became a byword. Boomers held new ideas about cities and communities found in books such as Jane Jacobs (1961), Rachael Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), and Michael Harrington’s, the Other America (962)”—and they learned the art of political mobilization from protests and anti-war movements.
Young boomers entered the post-industrial workforce as professionals, professors/teachers, government and nonprofit workers, entrepreneurs and corporate managers (Rowe, 2001). Molotch describes them as “cosmopolitan in outlook, pecuniary in interest”; they viewed cities [and neighborhoods] “more as residential environments than as economic machines”. Abbott labels these folk as “quality of life liberals” who worried that” breakneck development was fouling the air, eating up open space, sacrificing neighborhoods … and deferring costs of [pollution] to future decades” (Abbott, How Cities Won the West). Among other aspects, they were considerably less inclined to support economic growth to catch up with the city down the road (urban competitive hierarchy).
They also expected more from business than jobs and taxes. Spared the misery of the Depression and the horrors and loneliness of war, they expected more out of life—quality of life liberals followed an existentialism not associated with their parents or Abbott’s neo-progressive business elites. While eastern cities coped with fiscal distress and racial change, Sunbelt cities were coping with growth. Women became engaged in political life, facilitated by grass-roots neighborhood-level politics that tapped into traditional concerns of family, school and home. Western neighborhood-level and city-wide alliances proved a training ground for women soon to be elected mayors of western cities. Oklahoma City elected Patience Latting in 1971 and over the next twenty years, women mayors were elected in Dallas, Fort Worth, Austin, Houston, Galveston, San Antonio, Corpus Christi, El Paso, Phoenix, Santa Barbara, San Jose, San Francisco, Modesto, Stockton and Spokane. By 1987, women were mayors in twenty-six western and southwestern cities whose population exceeded 50000—half of the nation’s total women mayors in that year (Abbott, How Cities Won the West).
New ED/CD strategies were associated with this cultural change (new urbanism, smart growth)-and tools (growth management)—try using eminent domain after 1980; NIMBY, BANANA and a host of other complimentary euphemisms came from that folk; so, did NEPA, SEQRA and a host of federal and state regulations that reshaped ED redevelopment, and created a new strategy, brownfields. Even tourism was attacked as the “Devil’s Bargains” (Rothman, 1998). On the other hand, many young native-born westerners wanted to limit exploitation of the environment by extractive corporations, and were incensed with the paternalism and insensitivity of federal bureaucracies to local economic use of federal land. For them the federal government was increasingly viewed as a colonial power, its land management practices arbitrarily limiting growth and land use by fiat. This blossomed into a “Sagebrush Rebellion”—a rebellion which at its roots questions who controls western local economic development (Cawley, 1993).
Examples of our generational cohort policy shift appear by the 1970’s, coming in several forms. In 1976, Denverites contested the city’s involvement in the Olympics—which was supported by the entire panoply of the city’s political and ED establishment. Future Senator Patricia Schroeder, and Governor Richard Lamm, leaders of the opposition, raised 77000 signatures (1972) for state and city constitutional amendments prohibiting public funds for purposes “that would only benefit tourism, business and real estate”. The Privatist Sagebrush Rebellion exploded in 1979 when the Nevada legislature demanded 49 million acres of federal land (86% of Nevada’s total land area) be transferred to the state.
Ron W. Coan 