An Early Version of Progressivism 1865-1935: Book 2

A Second Ship Sails Upstream: Progressivism 1865-1933

 

 

ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT IN BIG CITIES: Big City Progressivism

 

The stream to which we attach the label, Progressivism is very much a reaction to industrial capitalism, immigration and the social-economic-demographic change unleashed by these forces. In a previous chapter we introduced our initial sense of the Progressive approach and left it in the tender, so to speak, mercies of Josiah Quincy. That colonial-early Republic Progressivism could be summarized as:

 

A definite spirit of civic reform … directed by members of the ‘happy and respectable classes’ who obviously saw themselves as high-minded and responsible stewards of the city. Members of old Boston families, like Josiah Quincy, were intent on using their powers of political leadership to refashion and renew the urban community in which they lived–not only for themselves, but also for all the people of the community. This reform impulse, however, was destined to go far beyond the physical and material benefits of the city, gradually influencing the moral and intellectual standards by which the ordinary people of Boston lived and the heights to which they might eventually aspire.[1]

 

 

Over the next several decades Progressivism evolved into a multiplicity of “isms” and movements. Abolitionism was the most impactful, but Temperance and Prohibition, Women’s Suffrage, not to mention Transcendentalism and a goodly portion of pre-Civil War American literature sprung from this perspective. Most of these evolved into movements and community, indeed national, social and political change. Politics and political action and the use of politics to help the “common man” but the least fortunate of society, however, defined, and to remove evil and injustice constituted a very visible wing of Progressivism to the present day. Almost all these movements eventually centered about the federal government and national legislation as the most effective means by which these goals could be achieved.

 

Still Progressivism was, and never will be, one single set of values and priorities; it was always several. The tendency of Progressives to focus upon subsets and policy areas for special attention was always a feature of the approach. Education, for example, was a central policy concern and from 1837 Progressives such as Horace Mann (Secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education) schools and professional training-expertise was primary and permeated other policy concerns as well. The Boston Public Library (1848), the first large municipally owned public library was the crown jewel

 

Also Boston was an early leader in schools for the blind and Julia Ward Howe (Battle Hymn of the Republic) established the Perkins Institution for the Blind. While concern for the mentally ill probably originated with Quakers of Philadelphia, Boston’s Dorothea Dix was the leader in establishing the first “hospital for the insane”. The orientation around community and the belief that residents of the community, no matter their class or occupation, should not only benefit to the extent possible, but should be improved, a sort of early American self-actualization was also prominent. The concern for not just the “common man” but for the least fortunate was deeply embedded into the Progressive approach:

 

Those who set the standards for excellence in the city, like George Ticknor and his fellow Brahmins, were seriously concerned that even those people who occupied the lowest rungs of Boston’s socioeconomic ladder should have more ‘useful knowledge’ in order to raise themselves up and improve the quality of their lives … ‘and Boston was determined that the boys and girls, and the blind and insane as well, should have the opportunity to know enough’.[2]

 

Boston, Massachusetts and southern New England were pioneers in the crystallization of our Progressive approach–but other cities and regions also developed their own versions as well. The emigrants diffused this perspective across the nation as population movements criss-crossed the nation. Also other religions, Quakerism for example, added their own perspectives to Progressivism’s Puritan core. Progressivism would diffuse across the nation and by the late 1880’s it could be found in varying degrees of strength in regions and cities from coast to coast (Hawaii especially). And as it confronted and incorporated other cultural approaches prevalent in other geographies, Progressivism evolved into several different versions.

 

From all this we can glean several crisp elements of what constitutes our Progressive approach to economic development:

 

• It draws from and is led by an upper and upper middle class business and intellectual elite
• There is a clear separation between business/employment and the needs of the overall community. Private corporations are responsive to different values and forces and cannot be trusted to automatically address the community needs.
• The needs of the community, and responsibility to satisfy those needs, is paramount and the greater virtue for both the individual and the corporation.
• The greater concern is with people and directly addressing the needs of community residents. There is less sympathy (and trust) for indirect means and non-governmental entities.
• There is an optimistic, Rousseau-like belief in the least fortunate elements of the community and the obligation of the elite to improve their lot and provide the means by which these elements can improve.
• There is comfortability with government and the use of government to accomplish the needs of the community.

 

Progressivist economic development, similar to Privatist comes in several flavors (several “decks” using our ship metaphor). In this chapter we will trace three particular Progressive decks: (1) one which desired a physical urban pattern the polar opposite of the industrial city around which a community could prosper; a second (2) which attempted to modernize the industrial city to inspire the better angels of a new immigrant population and integrate them into the modern economy and society in order to avert social disorder, unionism and potentially European-style revolution; and finally (3) a reform of society, politics and economy to provide opportunities and fairness for the common man (including and eventually most focused on the most disadvantaged), the masses, from the abuses and injustices of an ever-powerful elite-dominated industrial economy[3].

 

As suggested in earlier chapters the Progressive Movement was dominated by the business elite of the early industrial period. Progressivist economic development is driven by business elites whose purposes and values are far from monolithic and which reflect the different occupations, scope and type of business owners/firms and their values and goals. The distinguishing characteristic among these three Progressive decks, therefore, reflects both the distinctive coalitions underlying each approach and the variation in attitude and purpose in business elites. Bluntly, if one views the business community as monolithic, a capitalist class for instance, this perspective will make little sense.

 

We, however, see important differences between elements of the business community which are “professionals” (lawyers, journalists, social welfare, architects, higher education, etc.), owners and employees drawn from local and regional firms, and a “corporate elite” composed of owners and employees serving in firms operating at multi-regional, national (and later global) scales. As we hope to demonstrate, these categories of business elites can differ in key ways from each other on how they wish to shape sub-state economic development. How (and if at all) each category enters into the economic development policy process is also likely to differ as well. In this period, for instance, our third category, corporate elites, were often the “bad guy”–the targeted evil-doer–of the other two categories. These corporate elites in the pre-New Deal era were much more likely to operate within the Privatist motif. Incredibly perhaps, these corporate elites tended to work well and closely with the leadership of immigrant-based political machines against which much of our second business category, the local and regional business community, strongly opposed.

 

Chronologically, the first of expression of the Progressive style in our transition era is the “parks movement”, a forerunner of the American planner movement. Geographically the parks movement, although within city boundaries, was most prominent in its periphery, vacant and less densely settled areas. In that our corporate elite grouping was in process of coming into existence (the robber barons were mere muggers at this point), the parks movement support was drawn from the professional class and the local business community. The political machines, based on early migration, if they existed at all, were relatively weak.

 

Progressivism Confronts Immigrants and the Industrial City: Parks, People and Planning

 

During these transition years, two needs rose to prominence: adjustment of the existing colonial city to the influx of migrants and immigrants (a population boom, if you will) and the identification and installation of an industrial city’s core infrastructure. In other words, social-economic integration of a new population and an expansion of the city physical landscape were the principal economic development-related goals[4] of these growing cities. Into this environment and time (1850-1870) wandered an exceptional and path-breaking individual, Frederick Law Olmsted Sr. [5] Born in Hartford Connecticut, Olmsted was a journalist, the so-called father of landscape architecture, and an oft-times bureaucrat-public official (Sanitary District). Some also credit him as a forerunner of modern American urban planning. As we relate Olmsted’s various contributions, the contemporary economic developer may wonder what this all has to do with economic development.

 

To people like Olmsted, the expansion of city, its increased size, separated its residents from nature and distressed the humanity and morality of their residents by burying them in the conformity, pollution and congestion of the industrial-residential districts.

 

As the American city expanded …, it simultaneously deteriorated as a place for human life and activity. In a nostalgic attempt to overcome these barriers, city improvers offered urban parks as normative institutions. These [parks] would be points of contact between the afflictions of congested dwellings and a curative natural environment, between uncouth masses and the social values of an ideal rural order….

They saw a need to revitalize and restore the balance between urban dwellers and nature, even if at government expense. It was right and just, they argued that the state should regulate and control the boundaries beyond which man could not travel without being a detriment to him and to civilization….

[They] believed a civilization of cities would not survive if it was cut off from nature. Nature had the power to uplift the downtrodden and instill the best ideals ….Thus islands of nature had to be inserted into the artificial urban milieu…[6]

 

And so in 1857 promoted by business leaders, New York City dedicated 700 plus acres between 59th and 106th streets to an urban park (Central Park) and commenced a landscape design competition. And the rest is history, so they say.

 

Olmsted (and Calvert Vaux) won the bid and the “Parks Movement” (1857-1890’s) was off and running. In the next twenty years (interrupted by the Civil War) Central Park was built out along Olmsted and Vaux’s “Greensward Plan” and similar parks were designed for Buffalo, Niagara Falls, Rochester, Montreal, the Emerald Necklace in Boston, Hartford, Wilmington, Detroit, Marquette, Milwaukee, Louisville, Chicago, University of Chicago, UCLA and Stanford Universities, Capitol Building and other cities as well. Philadelphia, Baltimore, St Louis, Omaha, Kansas City and San Francisco hired other landscape architects and developed their urban park infrastructure as well. “The fact that the park was planned in anticipation of future open-space needs is but one reason why Central Park deserves to be considered the beginning of modern city planning”[7]. The parks movement has made it into our economic development history in that the parks movement was the introductory step in the emergence of the planning movement–to which economic development is very much linked.

 

Central Park and the Parks Movement also represent to us the first clear, widespread, “jelling” of the values inherent in the second stream. Community well-being, integration of the immigrant population, an antidote to the negative externalities of urban growth and economic change, its use of government and public action to impart moral as well as socio-economic values (health and a bulwark against contagion and disease was a major motivator as well as the healing effects of nature on the human soul), and its dependence upon professional experts rather than private firms and its linkage to a rational plan, and politically powered by an upper middle class in the name of the less fortunate. To us, the parks movement fits quite well into our Progressive approach.

 

The economic development task the early progressive planner-architects addressed was to integrate the new workers and urban dwellers into the newly emerging industrial cities and in so doing create a sustainable urban fabric. At its earliest, this meant creating public water systems and urban parks; as we moved into the 1900’s it mean creating a sustainable municipal prosperity which could translate into jobs for city residents. Jobs and the household wealth they engendered would restrain the need that the new immigrant would turn to unions and political machines–and in extreme situations to violence and demands for social, economic and political change not dissimilar from the socialism that was reshaping European societies and governments. How this was to be accomplished is outlined by M. Christine Boyer:

 

… between 1897 and 1940, the city fabric, urban laborers, the poor and restless rabble-rousers were to be marked by a nexus of improvement schemes. Economic prosperity would be used to mask the problems of social unrest and the devastating conditions of congested cities. … congested city centers, overcrowded tenement dwellings, pauperization and destitution of the laboring classes, and uncouth frontier and country manner would dissolve with the overall rise in economic prosperity …. City improvers (progressive planners and their allies) could take hold of the physical environment of the American city. These select missionaries of taste would reveal the secrets of a natural and rational order with a degree of perfection that could discipline alike the baser instincts of common man and the exploitative impulses of the capitalist.[8]

 

While infused with a Marxist motif (and sarcasm), Boyer does reach into the link (physical modernization/upgrading and infrastructure) of the early planning profession with economic development. Through rational planning the physical landscape of the urban area, the city, could be manipulated to achieve both social and economic ends and goals. In many ways, this was the ultimate task that the progressives as a whole were attempting to confront: how to integrate all classes and elements into the newly emerging industrial city. The fear of ethnics, workers, strikes, and the union movement, the housing and mental health reforms, the park systems, the early garden cities, all were linked together to create through rational planning of the physical landscape a sustainable urban economy and society

 

In the end, do we consider the Parks Movement as an example of nineteenth century economic development? No, we do not think of Park Movement advocates as economic developers. Parks are an urban infrastructure, to be sure, and broadly conceived Parks advocates would have thought of parks as a necessary infrastructure and precondition for economic growth of the new industrial city. But our interest in the Parks Movement is that it is the first concrete example of the second stream coalition and values coming together in a national movement. It is not evident to us that the link between parks and social integration is sufficiently close to economic growth and prosperity that we can consider them as our first economic developers in the Progressive tradition. Rather, we tend to think that within the planning-architect nexus was a seed from which a Progressive wing of American economic development would eventually evolve.

 

The Garden Cities: Suburban sprawl done in good taste

 

Olmsted, to his lasting shame, also ventured into city-building. In 1869 he and Vaux planned and formed the Riverside Improvement Company to build a new residential community nine miles north of Chicago. Embracing 1600 acres, linked to the central city only by commuter train, they platted 2500 individual, half-acre lots on which they proposed construction of single family detached housing located on winding, tree-lined (non-grid) road system with several parks sprinkled within the overall development. They called Riverside a “garden city” and it was meant for workers as much as anyone and was advertised as “a perfect village in a perfect location”. The project went into bankruptcy in 1873 and was incorporated into a Cook County village in 1875[9].  Olmsted also worked with the New York City suburb, Staten Island. He developed a plan-proposal to transform “that malaria-ridden swamp into a system of winding tree-lined roads and parks suitable for residential speculators”.[10]

 

The garden city raises the specter of the planned creation of a new city outside the limits and jurisdiction of the industrial (now central city).This is an example of Progressive city-building. Equally important it, could also be construed as a rejection (at least an alternative to) of the industrial city as the desired form of urban evolution. If so, garden cities as planned suburbs can be a serious entry point to introduce the phenomenon of suburbs. The originator of the garden city concept is usually accredited to Sir Ebenezer Howard, a Brit who in 1902 founded a company that built the first real garden city, Letchworth. Howard titled this suburban development as the Garden City, derived from Chicago’s motto, Urbs in Horto, or “city in a garden”[11]. Howard’s path-breaking book was eventually titled “Garden Cities of To-morrow”.

 

Garden cities, we argue, will presage the Progressive approach to city-building which in the more established Northeast and Midwest took the form of suburban developments[12]. Garden cities do not draw their inspiration, or consider as part of their heritage, the Privatist city-building efforts such as Pullman, Illinois (which opened in 1884)–the company town of the Pullman railroad car fame (and the later scene of a great strike, riot, and federal government crackdown)[13]. Indeed they are a reaction against it.

 

The function of Letchworth and the garden cities that followed–indeed their chief attraction–was to serve as alternatives to the crowded industrial city. However, none of the garden cities that were built achieved the economic autonomy that Howard envisioned. Instead, they invariably depended for employment on a nearby metropolis.[14]

 

The garden city, we will argue is Progressive solution to the social ills associated with congested, polluted, densely populated and large central cities through a new physical form of a “natural” urban community. The garden city in some version will become the pre-World War I model for many of our earliest nineteenth and twentieth century suburbs. The irony is that the suburban alternative has been identified as Privatist. In that density and central cities has since the mid-twentieth century become closely associated with Progressive economic development, it may come with some shock that it was not always so.

 

Garden cities would arrive in America largely due to Frederick C. Howe and Frederick Law Olmsted, the younger. Howe was a Progressive reformer and his notion of garden city captures much of the distinction that we draw between Progressive and Privatist city building. Howe noted that

 

generations of urban living had produced physical and moral decay in the fibre of [Britain so that] it initiated the garden city movement. Howe believed that garden suburbs would not only urbanize the American countryside, but would revitalize the city as well, for they represented a shifting of emphasis from property to people … A garden city, Howe claimed, offered the first escape from tenements and cramped apartment lives…[15]

 

Howe himself wrote of his garden city as much more than a planned subdivision; he saw it as a total rejection of that nightmare of private profit[16]:

 

The city problem is primarily an economic not a personal problem. Our failure to see this is far more costly than the inefficiency and dishonesty about which so much has been written [the city efficient movement]…. The basis of the city is physical. The health, comfort, convenience, happiness of the people is intimately bound up with the material side of the city. Much of the poverty is the product of our neglect to control the economic foundations of the community. The houses we live in, the streets …, the air and sunlight …, distribution of wealth, the cost of living and the vice and crime of the community …. are intimately connected with the way the city is built.[17]

 

And for Howe the city at that time was being built, built badly, by Privatist forces:

 

…a million men are thinking only of their individualist lot lines, of their inviolable right to do as they will with their own, irrespective of its effect on the community. We do not think beyond our own doorsteps, we do not think in city terms. We have exalted the rights of the individual above the common weal. Our cities have been permitted to grow with no concern for the future and with no thought of the community or the terrible costs which this uncontrolled development creates.[18] …our cities have been planned by a hundred different land owners each desiring to secure the quickest possible speculative returns

 

This last statement could be written today; it was written in 1912.It was written not to attack sprawl, but to defend the need to create new suburban communities, planned to overcome the Privatist evils.

 

It was left to Frederick Law Olmsted the younger[19] to design and construct Howe’s first American garden city concept: Forest Hills Gardens (in Queens, New York) founded in 1908[20]. With no restrictive covenants, the 142 acre site, linked to Manhattan by the new Long Island electrified rail (a fifteen minute ride from Penn Station), projected a population of 5000, housed in mostly detached single-family homes, with some apartment buildings, row houses and twins. The town square was the commercial center, behind which was a village green and then curvilinear tree-lined parkways “snaked their way” to the periphery. “The overall effect recalls a medieval Bavarian town”.[21] The garden city concept outlined their conception of a “planned” suburbia, designed and built in essence, to overcome the dysfunctionality of a city built for private profit and to overcome the perversities of density[22].

 

While we confess to a bit of cynicism in our characterization of garden cities versus the subdivision suburbs which emerged in the fifties, the distinction seems somewhat valid in distinguishing Progressive city-building from Privatist city-building like that of Denver and Miami–and certainly Levittown of a future era. Suburbs though they might be, Olmsted’s creations were “planned” communities. Through the plan, design and land use was intentionally meant to counter Privatist grid-speculation which supported the dominant pattern of private profit by developers.

 

All of which leads us to finalize our conception of the relationship between city building (either Privatist or Progressive) and economic development. City-building is a form of economic development; it is not conventional economic development, nor is it especially prominent today (exceptions being the New Urbanism and retirement communities). Traces of it can be found in the “new urbanism” and in the privatist style in the retirement communities frequently built in the Sunbelt. Gated communities and subdivisions owned and managed by homeowners associations, i.e. Privatopia could also be versions found in unincorporated areas. Texas has several large master-planned communities and so does California. The New Deal and the Rouse Corporation would also launch several new planned communities. Oak Ridge Tennessee in its own weird way was a sort of Privatist city built by the Manhattan Project and whatever Disney World set off is another hard to classify form of city-building. In short, while “conventional” economic developers do not usually identify with these initiatives, it really serves no useful purpose to deny that they are a consistent, time-honored element of the profession.

 

Frank Lloyd Wright (the the City in a Garden)

 

If the Curmudgeon may once again over generalize, he would observe that contemporary Progressives are quite uncomfortable with suburbs as a category of urban form. There is a tendency to believe the suburbs exert a zero-sum impact on their beloved large, diverse, dense and efficient central city. Worse it is the residential, and until the last census employment center for the Privatist class–and those “escaping” blight and racial change. There are those, however, that tend to adhere relatively closely to Progressive values that do not think the central city is the “be all” and forever of our urban landscape. Their concern is with the common man and not with the capitalist class. Their focus is upon community–but a community of individuals. Frank Lloyd Wright is one thinker that embraces the suburb. His ideas, the polar opposite of Le Corbusier, will shape the future suburban expansion. But at heart Wright espouses the “planned” city–it just happens to be a suburb and not a central city neighborhood or CBD–and it bears a marked resemblance to today’s sprawl.

 

Wright certainly is a part of the planning-architecture motif common to early twentieth century Progressive urbanism. He simply did not believe the central city of his day would survive–“I believe the city as we know it today, is to die”. The cause of its death: obsolescence caused by the then-modern technologies such as the automobile and communication-technology induced decentralization. “People can spread out–they no longer need to live in dense concentrations. Wright did not want to inject nature into dense concentrations of people; he advocated dispersing people into nature (countryside). The home of the individual social unit will contain in itself … all the city … plus intimate comfort and free individual choice[23]. Where’s the sign-up sheet for “bowling alone?”

 

He called his new conception of a city “Broadacre City” because it was based on a minimum of an acre for each family. Rybczynski assets that Wright was actually influenced by the old socialist, Henry George and that Wright conceived of Broadacre City as a land redistribution scheme for the common man. Wright’s classic, the Disappearing City[24] contains few firm details or sketches, but the cheap land “out there” in the hinterland made his image somewhat “doable”. Later works, however, provided more substance to the image and concept of Broadacre:

 

Wright imagined a hypothetical site: four square miles of vaguely Midwestern topography including farmland, a portion of a river, and a section of hillside. Following Midwestern custom, a grid of roads divides the land into quarter sections; some of the roads are two level highways, cars above and trucks below, with specially designed interchanges… There is no functional zoning; instead schools, civic buildings, factories, a county seat, and an arena are scattered among orchards, vineyards, farms, and recreational spaces. People live in houses on acre lots, as well as apartment towers, and on small farms…. There is no center or commercial core, nothing that resembles a traditional downtown …. (and) Wright’s plan does not represent a complete city; it is merely a small portion of an urban pattern that can go on forever.[25]

This is the planned, unplanned city and aside from its fairly radical 1930’s perspective, it does seem a reasonable reflection of today’s outer ring suburban sprawl. Whatever else like it or hate it, Wright’s crystal ball must have been pretty clear and amazingly accurate.

 

Wright never actually built a Broadacre City and no one tried to copy him. But he did seem to launch a new literature and a recognizable focus to the future American home–the house. He did publish home designs in House and Home and House Beautiful. His concept, Levittown’s future “Rambler” is today’s pervasive ranch-style housing.  He called it the “Usonian” and he built more than 150 examples. His incomplete or partial depiction of a complete suburb arguably gave rise to the concept of subdivision and the “glass-roofed roadside markets” drawn in his image of Broadacre City reasonably resemble an enclosed shopping mall. The pervasiveness of various transportation modes in his Broadacre City image (rail, auto, planes, and believe it or not, personal Jetson-like flying cars bespeak his recognition that Broadacre City and the new urban landscape rests upon decentralizing transportation (and communication) technologies[26]. Wright saw the central city of his day as “disappearing”; it didn’t–although in the 1970’s it came damned close. But Wright did seem to understand how many Americans thought and what and how they wanted to live. The thrust of Broadacre seems very Privatist, but more precisely it is based around the individual and his/her family and is needs and wants as Wright imagined them and his notion that this community best expressed the needs of the average American family.

 

Social Reformers: a real alternative to the Privatist approach

 

After the late 1880’s through the first decade of the twentieth century, several large cities elected mayors who proceeded to enact a series of Progressive social and economic reforms. Some were one-termers (Seth Low, 1903, New York City, former President of Columbia University) others, more popular and successful, stayed around awhile and even got elected to higher office (Hazen Pingree, Detroit, 1889). Tagged with the label, Social Reformers, this selected group of mayors represents a Progressive big city alternative to either the City Efficient or the boss-political party machine. The first issue we confront with social reform mayors is the question of why are they included in a history of the economic development profession?

 

Several reasons led to our including social reform mayors in the history. First, the Progressive economic development stream is evolving through these transition years and social reform mayors are a significant aspect in that evolution. To understand social reform mayors is to better understand the core principles and values of the Progressive approach. Also, understanding which constituencies were attracted to social reformers may suggest segments of society and business from upon which the Progressive approach is drawn. Finally, and importantly, in reviewing the social reform mayors, we can see how, and to what extent, economic development was a vital element in their policy agenda and better appreciate the legacy of these mayors to the economic development profession?

 

Hazen Pingree and Detroit is an excellent starting point for understanding social reformer mayors and economic development. Pingree, a wealthy Republican shoe and boot manufacturer CEO, first won election (1889-1897) on the platform of anti-government corruption, and fear of corporate control (in the form of streetcar, telephone, gas and electric utilities). His coalition was a combination of old style Republican Yankees and ethnic Canadians and Germans.. This is not to say, however, that he replaced a long line of ethnic-based immigrant political machines. He didn’t; ethnic-based machines and political bosses did not have a major role in Detroit’s previous history and a large number of previous mayors were also business owners. It is also noteworthy that Pingree will preside over the early entrepreneurial development of the automobile industry[27]. He also engaged in what may have been Detroit’s most aggressive annexation period. He was reelected three times and then elected to Governor.

 

Pingree rooted out dishonesty and inefficiency in a fashion that excited civic up lifters … He brought the power of his administration against crooked contractors, bad workmanship, and the lax policies of municipal departments.[28]

 

As early as his first administration, Pingree exhibited a sincere concern for the working class. He fought hard and consistently to keep utility and streetcar fares down and eventually he became a strong advocate of municipal ownership of both industries. The Panic of 1893, however, prompted Pingree to confront directly high unemployment and working class distress by expanding welfare and public works programs (schools, parks, and public baths). He developed his “potato patch plan” which turned vacant city-owned lots over to the poor for gardens. He secured municipal ownership of the light plant, heavily taxed wealthy corporations and railroads/utilities in particular. In 1894 he said in a speech:

 

The most dangerous enemies to good government are not the saloons, the dives, the dens of iniquity and the criminals …[rather most of Detroit’ problems could be] traced to the temptations which are offered to city officials when franchises are sought by wealthy corporations, or contracts are to be let for public works.[29]

 

Pingree’s voting constituency shifted from middle class and business support to working class and poor and, if anything, he was able to forge the closest thing Detroit had seen to an ethnic political machine.

 

To the Curmudgeon, the most interesting economic development-related policy initiative of many Progressive-style social reformers is the establishment of the municipally-owned, later publicly (usually state monitored) owned utility. In this period, electric power was coming on line and to the early Progressives municipal ownership prevented corporate abuses and mis-priorites and ensured the protection of the average man in a key  and necessary service. Over the years, municipal and public utilities will develop in communities across the nation. Connecticut, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Indiana, Kansas, California, Oregon and even Texas and Florida[30], for instance, as well as the Great Lakes social reform cities of the 1880’s will establish numerous municipally-owned utilities in the next half-century. The Curmudgeon suggests that the municipally-owned utility presents the almost perfect expression of the key Progressive belief that services as well as economic development ought to benefit the community at large and not be driven by private profit. This concern for the overall community, the community as a whole, especially its disadvantaged, and its fundamental distrust of the effects of the pursuit of private profit on the community as a whole, as hallmarks of the Progressive “ship” and Progressive-style economic development.

 

Social reform mayors were also elected in Toledo (Samuel ‘Golden Rule’ Jones, wealthy oil drilling manufacturer, 1897-1903) who was followed by a second social reformer, Brand Whitlock (5 terms as mayor), and Cleveland (Thomas Johnson, wealthy businessman, 1901-1909). Each of these social reform mayors followed an essentially similar agenda over a twenty year period. The geographical proximity of these three cities, we suspect, may be a clue to their political uniformity.

 

Another variant of social reform mayor can be identified in Milwaukee. Beginning in 1910, a socialist machine, based on a heavily German immigrant populations with an obviously strong working-class consciousness complete with its own socialist boss.  A succession of socialist mayors held power until 1940. Obviously, these socialist mayors came into power without an instruction manual on how to be socialist. In many ways they mirrored much of the city efficient agenda–including honest government, administrative efficiency, use of experts, formation of a Bureau of Economy and Efficiency, but they did oppose commission and city manager forms as well as the various electoral reforms (nonpartisan, at large, short ballot). The lack of home rule authority prevented them from municipal ownership of the streetcar and utility firms which they did advocate. However, they aggressively pursued housing reform, factory safety, park development, a city-run employment office, paid union wages, eight hour day, compulsory strike arbitration, and free concerts. These socialist mayors were attacked from the left as “mere sewer socialists” for their pursuit of municipal ownership of utilities and better services rather than the overthrow of the capitalist system.[31]

 

Other social reform mayors were also elected in New York City (Seth Low, 1901-03), Jersey City, Philadelphia and Cincinnati but they were unable to establish dynasties or forge a durable electoral machine. For the most part in most northeast large cities, the home base of the ethnic political machine, social reformers were much less evident or successful. There is a noticeable geographic (Lake Erie and Great Lakes) and probably cultural (immigrant German-Scandinavian) propensity related to establishing a sustained social reform machine.

 

What may be more surprising to the reader is that large cities ethnic machines/bosses have considerable staying power–persisting at least to the 1920’s and in several instances to World War II. Whatever challenge manifested itself to the ethnic-base machine and boss politics were usually led by business coalitions which supported reform along the city efficient lines, rooting out corruption, emphasizing structural reforms, and attempting to transform government administration into a more or less mirror image of a corporation. These business coalitions were firmly rooted in the previously described Chamber of Commerce Privatist approach and their core constituency was the urban middle class and professionals. Progressive social reformers and traditional Privatist business-middle class reformers not only differed in their approach to economic development, but reflected somewhat different constituencies.

 

Because much academic research has viewed social reformer mayors as drawn from the 1880-1910 period, it does not include an individual we regard as the most important social reform mayor of all time, Fiorello LaGuardia, the three term mayor of New York (1933-1945). LaGuardia fits the social reform Progressive mould to the tee. Incorruptible, working-class and people-oriented, anti large business, the Republican harkened back to the Teddy Roosevelt era–and his intermittently close political ally FDR. LaGuardia unified the transit system under municipal direction, broke the city’s dependence on bankers, built parks, low-cost public housing, re-installed a merit-based civil service, reorganized the police force, built airports and highways and fought tirelessly against the remnants of Tammany Hall.

 

La Guardia’s  parks commissioner was Robert Moses and it was during La Guardia’s tenure that much of Moses-initiated bridge, highway, and tunnel construction occurred. In fairness, during La Guardia’s tenure, Moses had acquired such administrative, fiscal and political independence, based on his quasi-authority bureaucratic empire that Moses was for the most part beyond the control of even an aggressive and dominant mayor as La Guardia. Indeed, Moses regularly took on, and not infrequently won, serious battles against the President of the United States who was unwillingly partially financing a great deal of Moses’s most famous projects. Most members of our contemporary economic development profession would be reluctant to claim, or include, Moses as an economic developer–we do, however.

 

Inclusion of “the Little Flower” as he was then nick-named, allows us to better link the phenomena of social reform mayors to more contemporary politics and economic development. La Guardia is easily regarded as one of the very most respected and important mayors of the twentieth century. His politics and personality, however, (he reminds the Curmudgeon more of LBJ in personality) and his perceived association with Robert Moses, his Parks Commissioner (who was a frequent political rival and whom La Guardia seriously did not like), has complicated his historical reputation among modern Progressives. Nevertheless, La Guardia is clearly associated with the great infrastructure solution to the urban-Depression era crisis of his day. While not directly linked to urban renewal which was a post-World War II development (LaGuardia died in 1947), La Guardia came as close to it as possible with many housing projects, airport, highway, bridge and tunnel constructions (the Cross-Bronx) and his leadership and use of federal dollars and programs flowing from the pre-war New Deal. He retired in 1945 with New York City on the brink of fiscal collapse resulting from, it is alleged, bloated union wage public bureaucracies and debt to pay for outsized infrastructure installation.[32]

 

A couple of observations related to economic development seem warranted. First, social reform mayors, where successful, could forge a machine-like alliance with immigrant and working class voters. These social reform coalitions, probably because of their honest and Progressive political agenda, are seldom considered as machines and social reform mayors are never thought of as bosses. The agendas of the two varieties of social reform mayors are distinct, but can, especially in their anti-corruption focus, overlap.

 

There is a discernible policy distance between social reformers and the more structural city efficient reforms. Indeed Progressive anti-business platforms are a turn-off for strong business support. Its use of government (municipal utility ownership) is a marked departure from the policy tone of the period. The social reform economic development agenda, to the extent it has modern day applicability, is certainly more “people” than “place”-based. Indeed, it is our observation that the Progressive preference for people-based agendas is a clear departure from the transition era dominance of place-based tools and strategies. The latter are quite possibly of secondary or tertiary priority in a Progressive public policy agenda. This is an early formative period to be sure, but the two streams are different as early as the 1890’s. To the extent, we are correct in our inclusion of LaGuardia; social reform mayors are, in fact, to be a prototype image of the contemporary Progressive mayor.

 

The City Beautiful

 

The City Beautiful Era (loosely including 1893-1920–it actually continued through the Depression and New Deal public works often embraced it’s principles) is an important period in the tale of our profession, albeit a somewhat subtle, if not confusing one. The era is much more critical to the planning profession than to the economic development profession, but, we will develop our perspective that Progressive and Privatist significant elements of what will be economic development travels alongside (arguably within) the planning profession through the end of World War II. The story is complicated, to be sure, in that City Efficient planning will evolve simultaneously and  alongside the City Beautiful planning–but they are not quite the same thing and spring from different roots. At the outset, however, the reader should be aware there is considerable overlap between the advocates of these different approaches.

 

It is a reasonable argument that during this era, several of these rings jelled and rapidly evolved to create comprehensive planning and the city planning profession[33]. At no point did during the City Beautiful Era/Movement was economic development the dominant or principal element. Economic development is at best a derivative concern of City Beautiful proponents. The City Efficient advocates, we would argue, focused upon structural reforms, honesty-anti-corruption and efficiency more as necessary preconditions for effective and efficient governance which was the foundation for future economic development. City Efficient did not envision a strong government as the initiator of a vision to change the community.

 

Some of the drivers internal to the Progressive City Beautiful era include: the Garden Cities folk described above, the Municipal Art Movement, the landscape architecture profession (including journalists and academic types), the women’s movement (an example of moral Progressivism drawn from Mohl’s earlier-described typology of Progressivism), and the “civic improvement or betterment” association movement. The constituencies that powered these sub-movements are disproportionately middle-upper class women, landscape architects and other professions, and the newly formed national-regional corporate elite. Landscape architects in this period were the driving force behind comprehensive and city-wide planning. Lurking offstage inspiring early City Beautiful initiatives was the massive (1860’s) Haussmann renovation-modernization of Paris, the mother of all urban renewal projects (60% of city structures were alleged to have been affected), and Vienna’s Ringstrasse. The twelve grand boulevards of Paris, radiating out from the Arc de Triomphe, tree-lined, and laced with magnificent grand civic buildings and residences provided a visual benchmark and a none-too-subtle model for American proponents of the City Beautiful.

 

The assumption underlying City Beautiful was that beauty, in the form of Beaux Arts architecture and tree-lined boulevards would inspire the city residents to a life of moral and civic virtue. How far anyone but an architect of arts culture-phile could actually believe this assertion is unclear to the Curmudgeon. Still City Beautiful shared with the Garden Cities a belief that nature and beauty was what was missing from the industrial city. Beauty was the antidote to deterioration, congestion, and misery in the physical form of the industrial city which extended to its poor and immigrant residents. Living in misery, without the presence of beauty and virtue, the poor (and their unions, bosses and political machines) tended to crime, violence, hopelessness and potentially to revolution. To better grasp the goals of many Progressive planner-developers during this period it would follow that “place” and the physical improvement of the landscape applied to place is the most effective vehicle to help and empower “people” who live in that place. That is not always the goal structure desired by contemporary Progressive economic developers–there will be a shift in Progressivist economic development later in the century.

 

Today, many economic developers believe jobs and skill empowerment, job creation if you will, is the logical solution to these miseries. This goal, however, is a relatively recent arrival to the profession. We will argue that through the 1960’s, the dominant strategy of economic development (and planning) was not job creation nor skills-education enhancement, but the physical (real estate, logistical-transportation access and infrastructure) transformation of the city and the region. Say it another way more pertinent to the City Beautiful period, infrastructure and modernization, clothed in beauty and reminiscent of nature and small town America, were the solutions for individual virtue, a moral society, social and class stability, and economic development–and the best counter to the pernicious effects of immigration and the industrial city.

 

… ‘thoughtful people’ … were ‘appalled at the results of progress; at the waste in time, strength, and money which congestion in city streets begets, at the toll of lives  taken by diseases when sanitary precautions are neglected; and at the frequent outbreaks against law and order which result from narrow and pleasure less lives’

 

The American city was marked by a void. It was blamed for having destroyed the uplifting qualities of the physical environment; everything had been sacrificed on The altar of industry and capital acquisition. No one had questioned every man’s right to disfigure the city with heavy smoke from soft-coal furnaces, stenches from soap factories and leather tanneries, unsightly billboards, and aesthetic nuisances.… There had been no time (in the building of the industrial city) to develop the finer instincts, to transform the ideals of communal living into an adequate physical environment.[34]

 

The solution, of course was “the city beautiful”. We shall concentrate upon two dynamic forces which drove the early City Beautiful era: the women’s-civic improvement association movements, and Daniel Burnham, the personification of the skyscraper, the architecture profession, and for our money, the father of American city planning.

 

The civic or village improvement movement dated as far back as 1848 with Andrew Jackson Downing who encouraged city dwellers to establish “rural improvement societies for encouraging tree planting and tasteful architecture”.[35] The first such group to form was in 1853, Stockbridge Massachusetts and it became “the prototype for all that followed”. “By 1880, Massachusetts had twenty-eight associations and Connecticut between fifty and sixty”. In the 1880’s and 90’s associations spread first to the Middle Atlantic, then to the South East and by 1900, California, probably the last, “had several dozens of associations.[36]

 

These municipally-based civic improvement associations were led and disproportionately populated by upper and middle class women, many of which were mobilized behind several of the other moral Progressive movements ongoing at the time. Like chambers of commerce civic improvement associations arose almost naturally in many smaller cities and towns. Like chambers civic associations were far from monolithic in their views and purposes. In fact, both Richard Hofstadter and Craig Turnbull describe these civic associations as “the coexistence of illiberalism and reform”[37] in that many used beautification and real estate techniques to keep undesirables out of their areas–a not so Progressive orientation. In later years of the City Beautiful era, the early Great Migration deeply affected the policy and activities of these associations. To counter what was viewed as “conservative parochialism”, Progressive reformers created a national association (similar to the NML) which came to be called the American League of Civic Improvement at first located in Springfield Illinois, and then in 1902 moved to Chicago.

 

Charles M. Robinson in 1899 injected new vitality into the civic improvement movement with his publication of a three-part series  “Improvement in City Life” in the Atlantic Monthly[38]. Robinson enlarged upon that movement and it is to him that we attribute the label, “City Beautiful”. The dimension Robinson brought into play was that public buildings and even infrastructure could reflect beauty and that a city hall, a public library or even a tree-lined boulevard and statutes-monuments could accomplish civic improvement goals and purposes:

 

‘When one speaks of the aesthetic side of American cities, one thinks at once of their public buildings; of their parks, statues and boulevards. But in any right conception of urban loveliness these would be only the special objects of a general and harmonious beauty’

 

Robinson took the broadest possible view of what he called civic art and discussed practical ameliorations such as limiting the height of buildings, removing advertising, cleaning streets, planting trees, improving lighting and installing public art…. He emphasized that while city governments sometimes took the lead in these improvements, a variety of private organizations such as municipal art societies, park associations and (of course) civic clubs (associations), also had roles to play, in a way that anticipated today’s park conservancies and downtown business improvement districts.[39]

 

Robinson’s ideas were incorporated quickly into the civic improvement association movement[40].

 

Thanks to his writing, Robinson became a national figure and was engaged as a planning consultant by a number of cities, including Sacramento, Santa Barbara, Fort Wayne, Denver, Des Moines, Omaha and Honolulu. He was part of the team that designed a ‘Model City’ for the popular 1904 Stain Louis World’s Fair; served on planning commissions in Rochester, New York and Columbus Ohio; and was appointed professor of civic design at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, one of only two universities in the United States to offer courses in city planning (Harvard was the other).[41]

 

By 1902 civic improvement could be defined as “the promotion of outdoor art, public beauty, town, village and neighborhood improvement”, in the same year the Chautauqua institution prepared and disseminated “improvement study guides” to the association’s members. At its third convention in 1002, the League created fourteen advisory committees including ones on “municipal reform” and settlements, sanitation”. Billing itself as a “federation of organizations and individuals aiming to promote the higher life of American communities” the  American League was spearheading the spread of civic associations in municipalities across the nation–to large cities such as Buffalo, Chicago, St. Paul, Milwaukee, and St. Louis and to smaller, frontier and left coast towns.  A1905 survey revealed that nearly 2500 civic associations existed[42].

 

How does all this fit into a history of economic development?

 

Forgive us the comparison, but one might construe these civic improvement associations as non-business, Progressive chambers of horticulture and real estate improvement. That these associations crossed over at times into municipal economic development is certain. Equally certain is that these associations were not primarily driven by economic development purposes. In many other ways, however, the civic associations were comparable to the municipal reform leagues described earlier in our discussion on Privatism. They make sense as economic development-related if we recall that the physical landscape, home and neighborhood beauty and order writ municipally large, reflected the period’s dominant perception of how to achieve order and prosperity through integration of immigrants into mainstream society and setting the standard for their neighborhoods and homesteads. No one at this point in time was defining economic development as job creation or knowledge-based economic growth–instead beautification (and order) improved the character and the moral spirit of American industrial municipalities by attempting to preserve a touch of small-town America into community and neighborhood. If viewed in this manner, civic associations can be viewed as an early forerunner of Great Society community development associations.

 

The more obvious link of City Beautiful with economic development arises from the life work of one of America’s greatest architect, Daniel Burnham. Daniel Burnham, an Upstate New York native, had established himself in Chicago as a noted architect and co-founder of a firm which was regarded as a nationally-known practitioner of the newly emerging Chicago school of architecture. The Chicago school’s signature distinction was, of course, the skyscraper. We pick up Burnham’s career in 1890 and the Chicago World Fair. The Fair, wherever it was to be held, was authorized by Congress to celebrate the 400th birthday of Columbus’s discovery of America. It was to be a national celebration, described as America’s coming out party and a testimonial to America’s coming of age[43]. The closest comparison of contemporary life would certainly be the Summer Olympics.

 

As might be expected a raft of big cities competed for certification by Congress. Each city was represented by a citizen’s and businessman’s host committee, each with the support of their municipal and state governments. Each out-promised the other (can the reader picture the lobbying techniques employed to acquire favor of Congress) and one plausible explanation for Chicago’s nick-name, the Windy City, arises from this competition. Say what you will about city planning, and city beautiful, this competition was sheer municipal boosterism that would make any economic developer proud. Chicago, then the second most populous city, had just completed a huge annexation, established a sewer district which embraced much of Cook County, and had commenced the construction of a ship canal that would reverse the flow of the Chicago river. Chicago was on a roll and was not about to lose the competition.

 

It didn’t. Burnham, a leader of the Chicago delegation, was chosen to be the Fair’s chief planner and director of the works. In the spring of 1893, The Great White City placed on exhibit America’s (and Chicago’s) technological and inventive achievements before the world. More than twenty-one million people attended (Burnham apparently was Chicago’s tourism director as well). The architecture, the unified plan, and the canals, as well as the infamous “little Egypt” (a stripper), ignited the crowds, and the imagination of the world. If timing is everything, Burnham timed it right (excepting that it coincided almost exactly with the Panic of 1893). He emerged from the Fair as the nation’s best known architect and the desire of virtually every American city to copy in some way the Great White City was to launch officially the City Beautiful movement and start the process which would culminate in the launch of the city planning profession. It also greatly increased business at his architectural firm and given Burnham’s natural entrepreneurship, a considerable dose of privatism was unloaded upon the city beautiful.

 

To be sure, the four year Panic slowed the pace dramatically, but by 1897 the race was on.

 

… a penchant for structures of classical stability, and in the colonnades and pediments of the White City … was, indeed, a prophecy,  forecast of monumental city halls, public libraries, museums, union stations, banks, and academic halls to be built over the next twenty or thirty years. As clearly as a royal edict, the fair proclaimed the aesthetic principles that would govern the design of civic centers, malls, boulevards, university and college campuses, waterfronts and other expositions for two decades or more. It powerfully persuaded visitors from Omaha, Buffalo, St. Louis, Portland, Seattle, San Francisco, San Diego and other cities that they too must commemorate great events in similar fashion.[44]

 

The City Beautiful Movement picked up considerable steam when the U.S. Senate (1900-1902) established a commission to plan what would become today’s Washington D.C.’s national mall. Several members of this McMillan Commission, including Burnham, had worked together on the 1893 World’s Fair and they constructed a new plan for Washington D.C. which included the mall, the Federal Triangle, Union Station and the Lincoln and Jefferson monuments. The plan established a model for other cities to imitate. In 1910 Congress established the Commission of Fine Arts to implement the McMillan Plan and over the next decade much of the mall was rebuilt and the Lincoln Memorial was constructed. Following this lead world fairs in Saint Louis, San Francisco and San Diego propelled the city beautiful design principles to ever-higher visibility and added a considerable “coolness” factor to the movement.

 

Burnham’s 1902 Washington D.C. plan remade and enlarged the original L’Enfant Plan. The Mall. Union Station, the buildings and the boulevards transformed Washington into the perfect expression of the City Beautiful and elevated comprehensive planning to a first order urban priority.

 

Burnham’s Washington Plan drove home the value of comprehensive city planning. Like the Chicago’s World Fair, the monumental Washington plan awakened and nurtured the belief that urban life could be orderly and efficient, that cities could be beautiful and inspiring. Capturing the attention of civic leaders in other cities, Burnham’s grandiose Washington plan gave new impetus to urban planning.[45]

 

Burnham, as one might expect, did quite well with all of this design and construction. Skyscrapers, which had been confined previous to 1900 to Chicago and New York, spread to almost all major downtown districts– and neo-classical architecture, for good measure was also inserted into central business districts which now became not only a manufacturing but an office, retail and cultural-recreational district. The CBD, as we imagine it in its Golden Age was now in the process of its initial construction. By the definition of most, this aspect of the City Beautiful era was certainly economic development of its day. Daniel Burnham might be also named the “father of the modern CBD”.

 

City after city sponsored design competition for their version of desired construction–and from these competitions came visions of the urban future. Cleveland, for example, led by its Chamber, its chapter of Institute of Architects conducted a design competition which sought to emulate the cluster of public buildings of the Chicago Fair. From this competition would come the “Group Plan” which cluster a city hall, courthouse, public library and post office around a beautiful park and situated on a grand boulevard. Added to that motley assemblage was the nation’s very first “civic center”.

 

This civic center project, the prototype of dozens of others in first two decades of our century, was also a slum clearance effort. On the forty-four acre site … stood many old buildings, including a five story light manufacturing structure…[46]

 

Other cities implemented city beautiful CBD projects over the next few years, including Detroit, Pittsburgh and Philadelphia. Prestigious college’s, such as Johns Hopkins (Baltimore), Rice (Houston), Southern Methodist (Dallas), California Institute of Technology (Los Angeles) and the University of Colorado (Denver) designed the campus around city beautiful principles. Train stations, built in imitation of Union Station, were constructed in New York, Philadelphia, Kansas City, Dallas and Los Angeles[47].

 

“Plaster fantasy”[48] as it was, the World’s Fair and the City Beautiful could not hide the deterioration so very evident in the central city and even in the new CBD. Alleys connected the resident to ghettoes and slums and the tenement house of Jacob Riis. Beauty and buildings alone was not going to successfully confront the dangers lurking in the new industrial city. Pioneered by Burnham, the need was for a complete remaking of the city and to do that one needed “the comprehensive plan”. In 1896, at a formal dinner party Burnham proposed to a group of elite businessmen (such as Pullman, Marshall Field, and Phillip Armour), a scheme which would evolve over the next decade into a formal plan for the entire Chicago region. The Burnham of “make no little plans” fame had commenced in earnest his urban planning career.

 

Burnham and his comprehensive plan did stumble badly in San Francisco, however.  Its failure there makes more visible the contrast between the City Beautiful Progressive plan and Privatist economic development. In early some 1904 San Francisco merchants and a former mayor, desiring the city to issue a series of municipal bonds to finance a hospital, sewers, schools, streets, library, jail and playground and parks improvements, formed a civic association (Association for the Improvement and Adornment of San Francisco (AIASF)). Phelan, the San Francisco Bulletin and other business leaders were at the same time locked in a bitter struggle with the Ruef political machine–which they would topple and send Ruef to jail in 1907. The AIASF had more limited aims:

 

… to formally discuss a plan for the improvement of San Francisco ….San Francisco is at a turning point of its growth. It can either be a great and beautiful and attractive city where men and women of civilized tastes and wants will desire to live, or a great and ugly and forbidding city which people will shun.[49]

Other improvements included an opera house auditorium, a music conservancy, planting of flowers and trees, prohibition of overhead trolley car wires (“as not befitting the dignity and beauty of our principal streets”) and the construction of harbor improvements made “necessary by the growth of commerce and the increasing population …”), but all was to be achieved through a comprehensive plan which would “elevate the public taste” and serve as a “great advertisement for our city”[50].

 

San Francisco businessmen, like their counterparts elsewhere, were generally optimistic about the prospect of remaking their city. They sensed that man could control his environment, that almost anything could be accomplished. A beautiful planned city would, they thought, lessen discord among different groups and help their cities capture the national reknown they deserved.[51]

 

In February 1904 the AIASF invited Daniel Burnham to town–Burnham brought along his assistant, Edward Bennett (who would later devise Portland’s comprehensive plan). In due measure, 1905, Burnham and Bennett produced a wonderful plan following faithfully city beautiful and McMillan Commission principles and design. In the midst of the discussion on the Burnham plan, San Francisco (April, 1906) suffered through the famous earthquake and almost totally burned down. While terrible for the city and its populace, the virtually complete destruction of the past built environment had to create an opportunity for the plan’s speedy implementation. To the contrary, over the next year the plan went nowhere and the city was rebuilt with little or no correspondence to the outlines and principles of the Burnham plan.

 

Street construction proved to be a particularly contentious issue, for until the locations of streets were fixed and the streets rebuilt, businesses could not fully resume operations. Merchants and other businessmen who had long supported planning now broke from it in the interest of getting back in business as soon as possible. … Another divisive matter was the proposed extension of new strict ordinances governing the building of fireproof structures … to make San Francisco more secure against future blazes. The attempt led to vociferous opposition from small business owners … as too expensive….  A third issue that immediately surfaced was that of the building of a civic center (which) some businessmen countered, however, that San Francisco could not afford the expense of such a luxury… Overarching all of those individual issues was … a common fear on the part of many businessmen they could not afford the higher taxes they thought would be required by the improvements mandated by planning.[52]

 

Still, city planning had arrived as a profession and as an instrument of urban revitalization during the city beautiful decades. In 1907[53], Harford Connecticut established the first Planning Commission in the nation. Within a decade, virtually every city had one. By the 1920’s these planning departments were developing metropolitan plans for their regions. The EDO companion to the Chamber, the city planning department, took its place in the governmental bureaucracy.

 

It would be most helpful for contemporary economic developers to appreciate that planning, especially in its early years, was itself a “big tent”. Universities started courses and programs and students “piled” into them–lured by a new, exciting, and potentially full of opportunities for career experiences. The profession had yet to “professionalize”, and it certainly had not siloized in this period. Within a municipal bureaucracy, the planning department could easily have been the “go to” place to dump special projects and new initiatives. The overlap, as we see with our San Francisco case study, of the comprehensive plan (and zoning-industrial parks) with economic development was considerable in these early years.

 

Moreover, one should not assume that a planning department in one city, region or state was the clone of all others. Internal units within planning departments likely were composed of distinctive staff. For instance, over the next generation, it is likely, in our opinion, that more Progressive planners gravitated into housing-related or metropolitan planning programs and activities, while more privatist planners shifted into zoning and building codes. We suspect the Planning or Housing Departments housed those Progressive programs and activities which came closest to economic development in function and purpose. Perhaps interestingly, to this very day, over twenty per cent of EDOs are lodged in planning/housing departments.

 

Port Authorities: the Progressive ship sails into harbor

 

The Curmudgeon, always on the lookout for those phenomena which seems to make his “two ships” metaphor seem, if not relevant at least minimizes any perceived clumsiness, was happy, if not surprised, to discover the role of port authorities in the evolution of American economic development. Our discussion of Northeastern port cities in Chapter 2 skirted around the public port authority–observing that none were used in those jurisdictions and that their non-use was an exception to the larger national pattern. The unappreciated reality of early twentieth century economic development is that the formation and expanded use of public port authorities was an important, indeed major, step in the evolution of our profession and economic development practice. Public port authorities have largely dropped off the twenty-first century economic development radar screen, but interspersed among the great variety of contemporary economic development organizations can be found the surprisingly widespread, strategically powerful, but very little noticed dinosaur-like port authority[54].

 

Port authorities have an interesting past. Not surprisingly, much of the nineteenth century port facilities were privately-owned and de facto shipping monopolies of railroads, power utilities and mining corporations. Today’s public port authority is more than likely a quasi-public, state chartered, often locally driven public authority whose first priority is to service, of all things, a port (and often an airport). They are perceived by many economic developers as certainly economic development related, but not directly in the business of economic development and port authorities and airports, have their own professional associations[55] which operate outside the parameters of conventional economic development. In the Curmudgeon’s mindset, however, transportation infrastructure and trade functions are critical to the practice of economic development that the distinction and separation of these structural forms from the core of economic development practice seems quite arbitrary and a distortion. This mindset is reinforced in that most current port authorities include rather conventional economic development tools and programs. In a few states, port authorities to this day are a vital element of sub-state economic development , not to neglect that port authorities exist in every state SSS and in some states are a core EDO-type (see Oregon, Washington and Ohio for instance).

 

We shall in the next few pages suggest that public Port Authorities from their birth functioned as economic development agencies. And that the port authority was the first economic development-related structural expression of early Progressivism. As we shall quickly discover, however, as much as Progressives inspired and employed port authorities to achieve their purposes, Privatist-oriented economic development would also seize upon the EDO structure and adapt it to achieve Privatist ends as well[56]. In any case, using New Orleans and Portland Oregon as examples we shall demonstrate how early ports (and some port authorities as well) served as an initial battleground (with serious economic development relevance) in the Progressive pushback to private power and business monopolies.

 

Previous to the first decade of the twentieth century there were a few examples of a public port authority in operation. The most notable were those in San Francisco (1863) and New Orleans, the latter authorized by Louisiana state legislation in1896. The former was a state commission and the latter was a state empowered, locally driven municipal level “authority” governed by “commissioners (appointed by the governor from local nominations of individuals “predominately identified with the commerce or business interest of the Port of New Orleans”)[57]. New Orleans as a port had by the turn of the twentieth century commenced its decline (in 1835 it was the world’s largest port and by 1900 it had fallen to be the United States’ twelfth largest port).

 

The decline prompted the private businesses which dominated the port (the New Orleans Steamship Association) to take corrective action. It was their leadership and political pressure, exercised through the New Orleans Board of Trade and Chamber of Commerce which prompted and secured the approval of empowerment state legislation. Essentially, in the New Orleans situation, Privatist elites turned to the state and governor for a quasi-governmental vehicle with which they could operate and manage a revitalization of the port’s business–while preserving private decision-making and protecting private assets (a” Big Easy elite–an informal business grouping)[58].

 

We believe that in these early years, this type of private domination of the port authority was also shared by the 1853 San Francisco Port Authority and the soon to be discussed (1891) Port of Portland[59]. Indeed, it appears that in this era, the ceding of semi-public power to business such as railroads was not restricted to the Western frontier and the transcontinental railroad.

 

If we conceive of the seaport as a modal shift point for cargo, the interest of railroads in seaports is quite logical. Important contemporary seaports such as the Port of Los Angeles had their genesis as freight entrepots and were originally creations of railroads. However, their influence at the waterfront–not to mention their ability to act monopolistically in cargo movement–eventually brought public condemnation and a call for reform.[60]

 

The “lock” over the appointment process detailed in the empowerment legislation, however, ensured that in New Orleans’s case, Privatist control was not effectively challenged for generations.  Initially the New Orleans authority acquired privately owned jetties, wharves and piers and then was stymied; it was only in 1908 that the authority undertook dramatic projects financed by its first issuance of authority bonds. This delayed programmatic aggressiveness is interesting in that 1907-1911 was the period during which a virtual horde of newly created and specially empowered port authorities spread across the nation’s coasts[61] (except, of course, the Northeastern cities).

 

The truly remarkable emergence of the port authority as our first economic development agencies is vividly demonstrated by the events occurring within the older (1891) Port of Portland Oregon; The Port of Portland was created in 1891 to perform fairly limited duties and quickly became mired in an ever-constant series of scandals (which persisted through the first half century of its existence). By the turn of the century,

 

… many Portlanders worried that railroads and other private corporations held so much waterfront land that Portland’s competitive position … was being damaged.  In 1910 the city’s voters approved $500,000 to acquire land for public docks. Mayor Joseph Simon, a political boss with obligations to the railroad, vetoed the council ordinance to sell the bonds. In response voters used the new initiative process to approve $2.5 million and create an independent Commission of Public Docks to break the railroad monopoly.[62]

 

The two co-existed, uneasily, alongside each other until they were consolidated into one port authority in 1970.

 

Oregon’s story does not stop here. Earlier, in 1909, the Oregon legislature approved a series of Progressive reforms which included, in an attempt to break the hold of railroad interests not only on Portland but the entire state as well. Included in this package of reforms was a single chapter (Chapter 777–Chapter 778 applied to the Portland) which stipulated a process by which many Oregon municipalities could create their own port authority. Also specified was the governance and the powers which these port authorities could exercise.  Oregon’s coastal communities, empowered to create their own municipal port authority (with locally elected governance) immediately approved a series of local port authorities: Coos Bay (1909), Siuslaw Oregon (1909), Astoria Oregon (1910).  Others were to follow and authorization was later extended to communities along Oregon’s major waterways. In 2013, the Oregon Public Ports Association asserts that twenty-three public port authorities exist and are currently operating in the state.

 

Just upstream, in the state of Washington, the story is much the same[63]. In Washington the public struggle between Progressives and Privatists focused around public ownership of port and transportation access and facilities. “In Seattle, Tacoma and elsewhere railroad companies had long controlled much of the urban waterfront as a result of concessions granted as cities competed to become railroad destinations”.[64] As early as 1907, the Governor (Mead) vetoed approved port authority legislation and attempts in 1909 were rebuffed as well. Every dog has his day, however, and in 1911 a series of Progressive reforms were approved by the Washington State legislature, included among them was the Port District Act.

 

The Port District Act, signed into effect by Governor Hay, empowered municipalities to create port authorities and directly elect their commissioners. “Progressives argued that public control (of harbor access and facilities) would permit coordinated development, financed by government-backed credit, and would ensure standardized rates and equal access to port facilities”[65]. Specifically, the port districts were authorized to acquire, construct, lease, and operate waterways, docks, wharves, and other harbor improvements, rail and water transfer and terminal facilities, and ferry systems. They were given power to levy taxes and (with voter approval) issues bonds, and exercise eminent domain. The three commissions of each port would be elected and the port authority itself would be independent of other governmental jurisdictions

 

Similar to Oregon, “only more so”, the port authority evolved to be the single most significant element of the state’s economic development effort. In 2013, there were ninety-five operating port authorities in Washington State–more than any other state. Washington’s two largest ports, Seattle and Tacoma are held to be the largest ports in the world with directly elected commissioners. Post 1940 state legislation would further empower Washington State port authorities to create industrial development districts and develop specific industrial sites, access to rail lines and to attract private industries. On top of this, state legislation authorized port authorities to embrace airports and airport-related activities.

 

All this was just the beginning of the era of port authorities. Port authorities were created along the Great Lakes. The City of Milwaukee as early as 1908 formed a Harbor Commission which led to city acquisition of land and construction of waterfront terminals. In 1914, the Wisconsin state legislature authorized the creation of the Port of Milwaukee. Albany (1925) and Duluth (1929) would follow in the 1920’s. California was a hotbed of port authority creation as well. As mentioned earlier, Los Angeles and Long Beach established their port authorities in the 1907-1909 period–other California municipalities followed suited through the 1920’s (Oakland, 1926, for example). Arguably, however, the crown jewel of the transition era ports authority movement was the New York-New Jersey Port Authority created de novo in 1921.

The trouble is the NY-NJ Port Authority just doesn’t quite live up to our very high standards. First, the New York and New Jersey Port Authority is not locally controlled and should not really be viewed as a sub-state EDO. It is an interstate compact. In addition, the title, port authority, back in 1921 was somewhat of a misnomer in that the NY-NJ Port Authority operated for more than twenty-five years before it acquired responsibility for any port or harbor related facilities. The NY-NJ Port Authority for its first quarter of a century was a transportation infrastructure authority which since 1948 has oozed itself into seaport functions and facilities. As a creature compatible with Progressive values, it fits pretty well, however.

 

To be sure, the Port Authority at the present time manages formidable port-harbor related facilities and programs; it is currently the largest port complex in Eastern United States. Its existence owes more to the federal Interstate Commerce Commission than to any Progressive effort to rescue the public interest from monopolistic private elites. Its birth flows from a Harbor Development Commission set up in 1917 as joint advisory bi-state entity, which was part of the solution to New Jersey’s 1916 law suit against New York. The lawsuit led to an ICC opinion directing the two states to play nicely in their shared sandbox, the Hudson River. While some economic development stories arising from “the Port Authority” will be picked up in a later chapter, suffice to say at this point is that port-waterfront facilities of the New York-New Jersey Port Authority are mostly located in New Jersey–not New York City. The Authority did not acquire control over the Port of New Jersey until 1948. Its New York City seaport related facilities were first obtained in1985 (Staten Island Howland Hook Marine Terminal) after their 1973 acquisition by New York City and leased to the Authority in 1985. The second major New York City facility (Red Hook Container Terminal) arrived on the Port Authority’s doorstep in 2011.

 

The New York-New Jersey Port Authority raises the issue and question as to what degree we can treat a port authority solely as a Progressive instrumentality. The NY-NJ Port Authority certainly utilized an organizational structure that was compatible with its ownership and operation of key bi-state infrastructure, including eventually airports, maritime facilities, tunnels, bridges and God knows what else. The powers useful to accomplish these functions were readily available and incorporated into the port authority structure.

 

These powers and resources necessary for those activities accompanied and were incorporated into a port authority by at least two related, yet distinct factors. The first reason was that the 1908 Port of London Act (which itself had been kicking around for several years previously) was both an inspiration and an instruction manual for importation to the United States. Secondly, as we have seen in both the Oregon and Washington State models, the port authority amassed a quite extraordinary horde of public powers–including eminent domain, bond issuance, all sorts of real estate powers and resources, planning and taxation. All this in one package, located in a separate entity-jurisdiction from any sub-state general purpose unit of government, simply to our knowledge, did not exist previous to the 1910 era port authority. The combination of these powers into one EDO-like structure, therefore, became available for other future uses as well. As such, we will see modifications made to create structures suitable to issue industrial development bonds (1940’s), federal power agencies (TVA), and housing-urban renewal agencies in post-second world war era. In short, port authorities deserve inclusion into our history if, for no other reason, than the port authority EDO-type became a staple of economic development for the next one hundred years.

 

And ironically, Privatist communities and jurisdictions were attracted to a structure containing these powers and resources for their own reasons. A fascinating example of how the Progressive structure adapted itself to Privatist city-building ish activities is found in 1910 Houston, Texas. The formation of the Port Authority of Houston Texas (1910) combines city-building, with managerial privatism unleashed by the hurricane which devastated Galveston in 1900 (that storm as the reader will remember also prompted innovation in city governance in the form of the commission form of municipal government). That storm was the storm that built Houston into what we know today.

 

As of 1890, Houston Texas was home to about 27,000 fine folk and Houston was about forty-five miles inland from Galveston Texas. Galveston Texas was home to 29,000 equally fine folks in 1890. Connecting the two was a not very impressive, fairly shallow sliver of water called the Buffalo Bayou. Cargo from large ships would break bulk in Galveston onto barges and the barges would make their way inland on the Buffalo Bayou to Houston.  Congressman from Houston (Tom Ball) wanted to convert that sliver of water into a shipping canal and make Houston a deep-water port–but he got nowhere, for at least ten years. And then the storm struck in 1900. Eight thousand Galvestonians lost their lives and much of the city was swept away.

 

Almost at the same time as the storm, oil was discovered, at Spindletop, Texas (near Beaumont) on January 10, 1901, and the opening shot of Texas Oil Boom was heard. Somehow Congressman Ball was able to persuade his House colleagues to fund fifty per cent of the cost of dredging Buffalo Bayou and making it a deepwater canal. All that was needed was the other fifty per cent (about $1.25 million). In 1909 the County formed the Harris County Houston Ship Canal Navigation District (seven words in the title–they do think big in Texas–it’s a port authority anyplace else).

 

A campaign was launched to convince voters to approve the port authority and a bond issue–and both were approved. On January, 1911 the Port Authority of Houston went into operation. It shortly after issued the bonds. But no one would buy the bonds. Jesse H. Jones[66], then a mere bank President, convinced each bank in Houston to ante up and the bonds were purchased. The canal was dredged and today in 2013 the Houston Port Authority is the top ranking United States port in terms of foreign tonnage and home to world’s second-largest petrochemical facility.

 

As Texas grew in no small measure to the Texas Oil Boom, Texas cities blossomed also and as they expanded, so did their need to acquire port access to the Gulf. Throughout the 1920’s additional port authorities were created in Brownsville (1925), Corpus Christi (1926), Post Isabel-San Freeport Texas (1927), Brazos River, (1927) and Benito Texas (1928). In 2013 sixteen Texas port authorities were operating. Lake Charles Louisiana also established its port authority in 1924. Also, the 1910 federal Rivers and Waters Act provided the first significant dose of federal funding for what would eventually be a 3,000 mile Intracoastal Waterway. Florida Port Authorities were not far behind as Palm Beach established theirs in 1915, St Lucie (1920) and Port Everglades (Broward County) Florida in 1927. The Tampa Port Commission, another city-building privatist endeavor was in operation by 1924.

 

 

This burst of port authority creation was only phase one of port authority history. We will see other bursts after World War II and especially during the 1960’s and 1970’s. Today there is literally hundreds of operating port authorities across the nation and yet their huge role and significant heritage within the conventional economic development profession is still little appreciated, but, for no other reason, the economic development structure which was pioneered by the port authority has proven to be the key structural vehicle for much of mainstream economic development.

 

If we combine our second chapter observations on the lack of port authorities with our present treatment of port authorities, we are struck by the variability of purpose-goals that port authorities were intended to achieve. The same structure with essentially same powers was used in the Pacific Northwest to challenge monopolistic pricing and access control by railroads and other harbor-logistics interests, while at exactly the same time, other communities are creating port authorities to “build cities” or to protect, if not enhance these very same harbor-and railroad interests. That the same EDO-structure can be used in the same time period to achieve varying, if not contradictory goals, is not shocking–probably not even surprising. But there is value in calling this reality to the reader’s attention. In future chapters new structures and programs will parade before our ever-glazed eyes, and the reader should not, perhaps never assume, that these programs are similar and uniformly implemented throughout the nation. In fact, the opposite is more likely the reality. Urban Renewal, EDZ, TIF, IRB and a whole assortment of other programs will evidence their own patterns of variability and pursue multiple goals. It is the variation and goal disparities that are to us more interesting and in constant need of explanation and understanding.

 

Neighborhood Planning: The Birth of Community Development

 

The dominant paradigm in the early planning movement reflected a sincere belief that the physical environment could (1) change/affect individual attitudes, behavior and values to reflect desired social ends and (2) that economic growth and community prosperity could be achieved through the provision or modernization of the physical structures, infrastructure and land use patterns of urban areas. The emphasis, obviously, was upon the built environment of a city.

 

As time passed, some Progressive reformers, notably those social reformers whose concerns principally were for the individuals, the immigrants, the victims of mental health disease, and the poverty-stricken. They were ultimately more interested and concerned with “people”. In the early years of the social reform movement, such social reformers could accept that change in the physical structures, away from the tenement, and establishment of mental health facilities in park-like environments, were wonderful solutions to the misery of individuals. As time elapsed, however, the link between individuals, the people, and fixation upon the built environment became more obscure and even tenuous. By the middle 1920’s and 1930’s, while many housing advocates advocated slum clearance and public housing, other social reform types openly questioned where the individual, the residents of these structures, fit into the picture. Were they largely being forgotten? Had planning become too rational? Too bureaucratic? Too aligned with “business” interests and profit?

 

Perhaps the first obvious manifestation with this unease of social reformers, mainstream housing planners and City Beautiful advocates jelled around planning for neighborhoods. A leader in this neighborhood planning sector was Clarence Arthur Perry; Perry was deeply involved in the earlier period with the Forest Hills Gardens project (developed in 1909 and with the support of the Russell Sage Foundation). Satisfied that Forest Hills preserved the balance between the physical and the social (individual), Perry then, as an employee of Russell Sage, moved into the community center–recreation movement[67] Perry’s 1910 book, Wider Use of the School Plan became the movement’s bible and it was supplemented by many additional pamphlets and monographs over the years.

 

Perry himself described the community center movement as “but an extension of the settlement movement”[68] and perceived neighborhoods and neighborhood facilities as the link between individuals-residents, their overall well-being, and an effective democracy.[69]

 

In the more fluid period of their history, before planners attempted to establish as separate discipline, social and recreation workers were active participants in planning circles, thereby interjecting many of their special concerns into planning proposals. The neighborhood approach to those civic concerns can be traced to a 1907 St Louis plan. While other cities, following the inspiration of the 1893 Columbian Exposition, were proposing centralized civic centers as part of their efforts to promote the city beautiful, the Civic League of St Louis suggested formation of a half-a-dozen civic centers in various parts of the city that could combine semi-public and private facilities around a common center.[70]

 

At that time, the notion that “physical changes in the urban fabric … could improve social life and enhance citizenship”. These links were supported by a 1909 work by Charles Horton Cooley, Social Organization, in which he argued that the family, the play group, and the neighborhood or community group of elders were the three most important factors in the socialization process–he saw the neighborhood as the nursery for what he called the primary ideals, such as loyalty, truth, service and kindness”.[71] For these early neighborhood activists and planners, the neighborhood, if planned correctly, could recreate in urban America the small town and the virtues associated with small town living. In 1924 Perry wrote that a planned neighborhood

 

…with its physical demarcation, its planned recreational facilities, its accessible shopping centers, and it’s convenient circulatory system … would furnish the kind of environment where vigorous health, a rich social life, civic efficiency, and a progressive community consciousness would spontaneously develop and permanently flourish.[72]

 

How do these social reforms tie into economic development? In the minds of these social reformers it worked this way: for example a park and recreational system in Birmingham Alabama in 1911 was defended by its planner, the noted Charles Mulford Robinson in the following way:

 

To an increasing degree, the better class of labor chooses its abode, and chooses the city where it secures the most for a given wage. Undoubtedly also opportunities for wholesome recreation increase the efficiency of labor and its contentment. When the offices of the National Cash Register Company, a few years ago were asking a city in which to locate anew their plant, one of the first questions asked was regarding the park acreage, its accessibility and the opportunity for recreation.[73]

 

The positions advocated by these neighborhood planners dovetailed nicely with the prescriptions and perspective of the early Chicago School of Sociology represented by the work of Robert Park, Burgess and McKenzie[74]. The school of thought was built around its conception of the city as an ecosystem that evolved in a Darwinian-like manner (urban ecological approach). As such competition, between social groups, over physical space led to the development of distinctive geographies (an example would be a neighborhood) populated by individuals associated with the social (usually ethnic and racial) groups. As would be expected, class and income would enter into the competition and the competition would result in a hierarchy of neighborhoods and this hierarchy was expressed in rental and housing prices. Age of housing would normally become associated with the low end of housing values and prices and naturally the least wealthy would be “filtered” into the oldest housing and the wealthy into the newest.

 

Based on this an approach to housing and neighborhoods, called neighborhood succession, was developed in which the addition of new housing, destruction of older housing and/or the introduction of additional social, ethnic and racial groups would launch a population flow from one neighborhood to the next–creating a new hierarchy of neighborhoods. As such neighborhoods and their resident population would “evolve” in a pattern of neighborhood succession over time and distance. The first Chicago school fell out of academic favor long ago, but it persists in the various real estate professions to the present day. Variations of this Chicago school theme were used to explain suburbanization[75] as well as central city evolution. Contemporary economic developers would be wise to keep this approach in the back of their mind in that, while exceptions to their approach can occur (gentrification, for instance), many current neighborhoods do superficially, at least, follow the outlines of this now very aged model.

 

During the 1930’s, as planners and housing advocates moved closer to slum clearance and housing projects–hoping at the time to integrate these concepts into New Deal housing legislation (Wagner Act, for instance)–some social reform advocates abandoned the neighborhood concept as “obsolete” (Jesse Steiner, President of National Community Center Association). These revisionists argued that neighborhoods to achieve the effects described above needed to be, more or less, homogenous–and that Depression era neighborhoods had become too heterogeneous and too dense to achieve the desired effects. Neighborhoods could, and were, becoming “pseudo-neighborhoods”. The issue of homogeneity or diversity of residents would eventually be resolved by new conceptions of neighborhood based more on their replication of American diversity at the neighborhood level. Another issue, whether blight was a cancer which had to be completely removed, or instead be incrementally removed in stages–through substantial rehabilitation and housing code enforcement divided neighborhood level advocates and it would not be resolved until the 1950’s.

 

These ruptures in the original neighborhood planning and Chicago school models coincided with the emergence of the “business-Progressive” approach to housing and slum clearance. The business progressive model was most concerned with the effects of the Depression on neighborhoods of the central city and with the prospect of increasing suburbanization throughout the pre-World War II period. The realities of the Great Migration were now very evident in the form of physical-structural blight, the deterioration and insufficient supply of housing and the decay and non-competiveness of inner city neighborhoods and which made such entities uncompetitive with new suburban developments.

 

From hindsight we can now trace the gradual victory of the business-Progressives first in the years leading up to the Second World War, through the Second World War, and climaxing in its immediate aftermath. In this period, social reformers either joined with housing planners and moved toward public housing and slum clearance or were pretty much shoved aside. Some like Mary Simkhovitch retained their sympathy for and commitment to settlement house style neighborhood planning and Daniel Carpenter, Hudson Guild Neighborhood House in New York City stuck to his early concepts into the fifties. In general, however, this approach to community and economic development entered into a very lean period until the end of the fifties.

 

Housing and Slum Clearance Bleeds into Economic Development

 

The Big Picture

Our Progressive approach to economic development, as discussed initially, was based in large urban centers of the Northeast and Midwest–and driven by immigrants and Great Migration migrants and second wave of industrialization in our larger cities. Our present Progressive housing-slum clearance–urban renewal tale starts in the 1880’s and, in this chapter, ends with the Great Depression and 1932 victory of the FDR Progressives. In the meantime, the post-1929 crushing effects of the Depression and the collapse of the financial system had obviously played out; the negative effects of both were obviously huge, widespread, and left in their wake an emerging political consensus that demanded immediate and radical solutions–solutions that required the involvement, if not leadership of the Federal government. A good deal of the next several chapters will, therefore, discuss the entry of the federal government into sub-state economic development and urban policy as well. A page in our nation’s history is about to turn.

 

As it unfolds in the following section of this and over the next several chapters, our urban renewal story is primarily led by big city Progressive coalitions and actors and the semi-Progressive-FDR New Deal. The pre-New Deal story starts with Progressive housing advocates, realizing that the solution to urban big city housing inadequacy and insufficient supply meant increasing the scale of housing reform–from the individual unit and family to blocks and then to entire slums. The pressure of concentrated Black Great Migration emigrants settling into the older, low housing value neighborhoods, most of which were adjacent to the CBD created physical deterioration and a white population exodus which at the time was labeled “blight”. In this initial period when the Great Depression and the Great Migration combined in these troubled older neighborhoods. Progressive housing and neighborhood advocated and Privatist real estate-CBD business sectors and actors developed different approaches to redressing the situation. In this chapter–and the next–these two opposing forces will struggle against each other to define the problem and then to advocate to the municipal and federal governments for financial and programmatic solutions for each of their definition-solution.

 

The post-war entry of the national corporate elite sector into big city urban renewal policy-making created a new urban renewal coalition, business-progressives and housing-slum clearance reformers, who together compelled Main Street Privatist business elements to play nicely in a redefined housing-slum clearance-urban renewal sandbox. That would work for awhile, through the fifties mainly–but by the end of the sixties, the national corporate elite had fled the local economic development policy scene. Ground zero of sub-state economic development was left to more Privatist CBD elites and the real estate community–the now infamous “growth coalition”. That our two approaches to economic development would compete intensely on this policy and geographic battlefield is to state the obvious–but the real lesson to be learned from our upcoming discussion regarding urban renewal is how these competing approaches also cooperated, sometimes unintentionally, and compromised to forge a shared economic development strategy and tool which, we shall argue, will dominate economic development for nearly forty years.

 

The Story Begins

By 1933 the big cities were in crisis and from this crisis we start down the path toward urban renewal and toward primacy of economic development as an urban public policy:

 

Housing starts plummeted; waves of foreclosures took place, eroding the capital position of most Americans and feeding back on the entire economic system. ….Indeed, in the decade of the 1930’s, the proportion of home owners declined dramatically and the progress of the previous decade was aborted. There was a virtual collapse of the shelter system …. Riots and lynch mobs attended efforts of banks and municipalities to foreclose property …. A near revolutionary situation was evident[76].

 

Harkening back to Jacob Riis, How the Other Side Live (1890) and his “Battle with the Slums” (1895)[77], the Social Reform wing of the Progressive Movement had focused upon incorporation of foreign-born immigrants into the industrial city through housing reform and slum removal as a cornerstone of their approach to the crises of industrialization and immigration. In the early years of the twentieth century, the settlement movement and the planned neighborhood had captured the focus of these reformers. With the Great Migration, and then the Great Depression, the big cities, their housing, their residents and the neighborhoods were in deep frightful crisis.

 

Tactically, housing reformers in the early 1930’s had two choices: (1) moderate or substantial housing rehabilitation–the latter usually means demolition and replacement by essentially new housing or (2) construction of new homes in the urban periphery (which was opposed by privatist real estate and business firms and groups). Pre (and post) 1933 municipal efforts to implement either of these approaches proved to be unfruitful, ineffective and only served to disturb and inject discomfort to the residents who often responded in less than a helpful fashion[78]. There was no instruction manual available and it was clear that something besides individual moderate-substantial rehabilitation of individual housing units was imperative.

 

For many years civic organizations, architects, city planners and others in Cleveland had studied the subject of slum clearance and housing for the low-income group, but never had the matter gotten beyond the academic discussion stage.[79]

 

Housing reformers or “public housers” in the early thirties adopted as their policy solution that sufficient scale public housing meant “projects” and “planned redistricting” (or urban renewal) would be required. The area cleared by the planned redistricting project, however, would be for housing only and some commitment to relocation of existing residents would be made. In addition, while construction of the housing would be contracted to private developers, the completed housing and the land would be retained by the Public Housing Authority. With this policy in mind, municipal housing reformers, and Progressives who supported them, advocated for new solutions from City Hall and Washington D.C. It was recognized almost immediately that municipal governments, for various reasons, were unwilling to commit all the resources necessary to implement the new housing policy-approach. A sustained federal financing initiative, however, would overcome the fiscal limitations of their municipal government (often associated with a two-thirds referendum bond approval). The National Association of Housing Officials, in existence since 1910, would be their principal federal lobby.

 

The Public Houser concept of district replanning, however, was not shared by the more privatist-oriented urban real estate community. As early as the 1890’s, private realtor and real estate interests organized in each reasonably sized jurisdiction a real estate board or exchange. The local real estate boards themselves formed in 1908 the National Association of Real Estate Exchanges which by 1916 had changed its name to National Association of Real Estate Boards (NAREB) NAREB was their national lobby and industry advocate[80]. Already, the reader will sense that the page was already turning in economic development policy–even before the victory of FDR. Professions had developed over the previous twenty or thirty years and each profession formed a national and state association. As policy scaled to larger dimensions and more difficult goals, and more and more cities were growing population and problems, the federal government, grudgingly since 1920 was being called into service, mostly by states, but now by municipalities. National professional associations in this atmosphere assumed an advocacy and lobbying function in this process-transition.

 

NAREB and its municipal real estate membership shared a quite different perspective from the public housers. The real estate municipal business community opposed public housing in general and instead advocated for the removal of slum and blight from what central place advocates would later label the “transition zone” which was immediately adjacent to the Central Business District (CBD) of each city. These zones were perceived as truly nasty places by those who traveled through them on their way to work or shop. They were, of course, home to lots of people who had no other place to go. This last matter was not a prime concern of the real estate community. Cost minimization, profit, and project feasibility were.

 

During the last year of the Hoover administration (1932) at a Hoover-initiated Conference on Home Building and Home Ownership, a sub-committee, “the Committee on Blighted Areas and Slums” issued a report which dovetailed nicely with NAREB’s perspective. In this report slum and blight were delinked from housing (i.e.) cleared areas could be used for any purpose and if used for housing relocation of existing occupants was not required. Finally, cleared land could be leased or sold to private firms for redevelopment in accordance with a comprehensive plan adopted by the municipality. The initial victory of NAREB over the Progressive NAHO approach obviously upset and disappointed the Progressives and when Hoover lost, and FDR won, the battle was certain to be refought.

 

The reader takeaway from these last paragraphs is that previous to FDR’s election and the New Deal, two separate forces (one Progressive and one Privatist) had conceptualized their own versions of what we today call urban renewal. While each big city certainly was different in its own way and politics, it does appear that in most major cities neither of the two groups was able to totally dominate the local policy-making process[81]. Upon the election of FDR, both forces turned to his administration for support. We shall continue this story, therefore, in the next several chapters.

 

The Core Tool behind Urban Renewal: Eminent Domain

 

Eminent domain is a core tool of economic development. Much of the criticism levied against urban redevelopment and urban renewal originates from its use of eminent domain. The literature surrounding eminent domain is colossally large, but fortunately for us is either legal or more “how to” ish. Neither corresponds to our purposes in this introductory textbook on the history of economic development. We are, of course, more concerned with its historical evolution. The Curmudgeon is also interested in outlining the context in which eminent domain despite its controversy became a core tool in the profession; it did so in large measure due to its centrality in the development-redevelopment process. Also of some importance in our discussion will be the need to develop organizational capacity and the necessary construction of an EDO capable of conducting eminent domain and development-redevelopment.

 

There is also another vast literature, however, which outlines the controversial philosophical-policy nature of eminent domain which we cannot completely ignore. This controversy is appropriate because the “taking” of private property in a democratic society is, by its very nature, confrontational, zero-sum, and winner-loser. An economic developer should never use this tool without clearly understanding that she may be in for the fight of her life. This is a process which creates an underdog, invites the accusation of abuse, and usually is conducted without benefit of knowing whether the underlying project will turn out as planned. There are lots more potential pitfalls and downsides. Eminent domain is NOT just another tool in the economic developer’s toolbox. Supplemented by this author’s own direct experience in economic development eminent domain (for better or worse, successful), it is a tool which burns and consumes both user and used.

 

The taking of property from one private individual-corporation and the eventual transfer of such property to another private individual is quite a serious matter. On its face government taking away one person’s private property and giving it to another private person is just wrong. While not a terribly sophisticated argument, the seemingly inherent wrongness in using eminent domain for private gain is further buttressed by an equally simple, but compelling likelihood that such eminent domain inevitably raises the suspicion that the rich are using government to become ever richer. The saddest reality is that this suspicion may be entirely accurate. Eminent domain in an urban renewal-redevelopment project is one of the most challenging and morally convoluted action in which an economic developer will engage.

 

Our interest at this point in our history of economic development is to better understand eminent domain in a context that it was a necessary and sufficient tool for an urban renewal program. The issue for an economic developer is that real estate-based projects need to have the designated site controlled, if not acquired, before they can go forward. Projects, ranging from affordable or public housing, slum removal, waterfront redevelopment or whatever ultimate purpose must first acquire legal control before much of any substance can be attempted. Financing, for instance, is nearly impossible without site control in hand.

 

The pitfalls behind site control, especially for a private developer, involve holdouts, absentee owners and unwilling sellers who can raise the price of land acquisition to obscenely high, deal-breaking amounts. In addition, some sites today are actual or potential brownfields and the owner wants no part of waking a sleeping tiger. The time and costs of site assembly-control can irreparably damage and even destroy the viability of many a redevelopment project. In a large public-oriented project, as most urban renewal projects were, eminent domain will eventually be required if the project is to move to the finance and construction phases. Without site-control and assembly powers development and redevelopment in the public arena will become little more than an academic exercise. Accordingly, the economic developer should have an understanding, not just of the process and techniques (that is not our task here, however) but the issues involved, how they were resolved, and to what degree controversy regarding eminent domain is either justified or not.

 

As a starting point, eminent domain, despite a federal constitutional provision (Fifth Amendment which forbids both federal and state governments from taking private property without “just compensation”), has been, with rare exceptions, a matter of state law. There are fifty-one (including the federal government) systems and processes for eminent domain. Cities and counties and other units of government can add their own provisions and strictures. Each state has its own history and precedents regulating the use of eminent domain.

 

In the nineteenth century, state legislatures engaged in a wide variety of practices regarding eminent domain. Western state constitutions, as they were initially approved, were especially aggressive in permitting eminent domain for the management and exploitation of natural resources. Water infrastructure and mining (oil and gas, forestry) were critical in the development of the West. In addition, transportation infrastructure, the legacy of the transcontinental railroads in particular, and its role in city-building and urban development was considered in earlier chapters. From our perspective the most outrageous aspect of eminent domain in these early years the widespread delegation of eminent domain authority to a private entity:

 

Legislatures in many Eastern and Midwestern states delegated eminent domain authority to private transportation and manufacturing companies in order to promote economic expansion in a country with little surplus capital. State courts generally upheld this delegation on the grounds that the needs and wants of the community at that time were served by economic expansion. Thus the companies’ use of eminent domain was for a public rather than a private purpose

.… from a very early time in the Interior West, private natural resource development took on the mantle of public use…. Courts in those states …recognized virtually no judicial authority to balance the purported needs of the private condemning authority against any countervailing economic, land use, or social concern[82]

 

The delegation of eminent domain to a private entity today seems incredible, but states, even in the nineteenth century, were somewhat aware of the tenuousness of this delegation. By the early twentieth century state courts tended to (1) take a broad construction on the use of eminent domain by a public actor and (2) narrow the construction of eminent domain when delegated to a private actor to instances where the taking of private property served only public purposes not private profit[83]. As the reader might surmise this is a fine line to walk in real life.

 

In this environment the prevailing federal opinion was to defer to the states in the matter of eminent domain. In situations where the federal courts conducted constitutional reviews of state actions relevant to eminent domain, appeal courts and the Supreme Court “gave great deference to state delegation of eminent domain authority to private actors based on the Court’s acceptance that “different states had different economic needs based on their population, natural resources, and other economic drivers”[84]. The federal government was reluctant to intervene into areas reserved to the states. That viewpoint, in light of the recent Kilo decision, seems still pertinent today as well.

 

Eminent domain law, as relevant to urban renewal in particular, draws its roots from Progressive housing reformers, the most pioneering of which were from New York City. In 1895, the Tenement House Act was approved by New York State allowing the City Board of Health to condemn and demolish buildings declared unfit for human habitation. Some housing reformers pressed the state to allow for private parties to redevelop the slums–they were unsuccessful.[85] It was the sad misfortune of housing reformers that their petition for the power to employ eminent domain as a private party ran afoul of very increased court scrutiny of private firm empowerment generated by the Progressive Movement (of which the housing reformers were cutting edge members).

 

Concerned that government support for private business would be followed by government regulation of free enterprise, many [late] nineteenth century judges invalidated attempts at private/public cooperation … courts in the late 1800’s frequently deprived corporations of public benefits, including financial subsidy and rights of condemnation …[and] were generally ambivalent toward expansive interpretations of the Public Use Clause.[86]

 

During the 1920’s and 30’s, however, as an urban crisis appeared in ever-increasing ferocity, public housing reformers pleaded for the power to remove deteriorated housing; and the NAREB-ULI real estate crowd lobbied for slum in blight clearance in the CBD transition zones and the CBD itself. The state, therefore, courts, dealing with a changed environment and policy context, faced new pressures to accommodate increased usage of eminent domain by a variety of new groups and policy areas.

 

The late 1920’s brought a convergence of forces that supported the urban renewal movement, and several groups that were formerly antagonists in the battle for city revitalization began to cooperate. Real estate interest, housing reformers and big-city politicians all hoped to reap benefits through urban renewal, and they formed a tenuous coalition to promote redevelopment. Their goals were widely divergent. Housing reformers wanted government support to eliminate decrepit housing and replace it with modern, affordable dwellings, Politicians hoped to increase their cities’ tax bases and provide jobs …to their constituents. Real estate interests sought to gain access to large parcels of downtown property for profitable redevelopment. The planning profession provided a common language that joined real estate interests, housing reformers and local government[87].

 

Indeed, it was planners who coined the terms slum and blight[88].

 

Planners conceptually distinguished between the two concepts, inspired a new emerging literature (the ecological school from the University of Chicago[89]), and then promptly lent their concepts to any who found a use for them. Guess who found a good use?

 

Because the term was so poorly defined, blight became a useful rhetorical device–a means by which real estate interests could reorganize property ownership by separating ‘productive’ and ‘unproductive’ land uses. The development of the discourse of blight provided real estate interests with a means to rationalize urban land use ownership.[90]

 

The NAREB during the 1930’s and ’40’s promoted a variety of programs to privately redevelop urban neighborhoods. The NAREB was aided in this effort by its research wing, the ULI, described by its director, Hugh Potter, as ‘the city planning department of the Realtors of this country’. Together, the NAREB and ULI used the language of planning to persuade the public to support the use of eminent domain for private redevelopment.[91]

 

The Great Depression especially provided the inspiration for a “reconceptualization of the Public Use Clause. In particular, there was a need to have housing and slum removal legally accepted as a public use by the state courts. This was not necessarily going to be easy thing to do. A raft of state courts very quickly rejected housing as a public use under eminent domain and the Federal Sixth Circuit Court affirmed state court decisions in that, predictably, the issue was not “within the scope of the powers of the federal government”. The (New Deal) Housing Act of 1937, however, rectified the problem by requiring as a recipient of federal housing redevelopment funds a local housing redevelopment agency.

 

In light of the 1937 federal Housing Act state legislatures approved supportive legislation and courts affirmed its constitutionality. New York courts led the way in reinterpreting the Public Use Clause and supported the condemnation of properties by the New York City Housing Authority[92].

 

The court relied heavily on the argument that slum clearance was an integral part of public housing production and declared that ‘slum areas are the breeding places of disease which take toll not only on its denizens, but by spread, from the inhabitants of the entire city and state. The elimination of these areas through the construction of public housing, the court ruled, constituted a valid public purpose.[93]

 

Massachusetts and other states soon followed by emulating in their own manner, the New York State decision.

 

The next step, which would play out during the war and post-war years, was to start a campaign to expand the narrow courts’ decision from just housing (in slums) to the removal of blight and urban renewal. To this end, the development of the comprehensive master plan by planners during the thirties provided the justification or rationale. A driving force for the creation and approval of these master plans was the Progressive Coalition (which will be more fully discussed in future chapters). In city after city, the Progressive Coalition (where it existed) advanced a conception of urban renewal which included …

 

a public/private partnership, a suitable redevelopment corporation, empowered with an effective, legally-sanctioned power of eminent domain which would “provide public benefits by eliminating the decrepit urban core and replacing it with a gleaming modern city. Cities across the country organized commissions to prepare blueprints for the post-World War II era. Some, including Cincinnati, Portland, Dallas and Detroit, drafted comprehensive plans for their cities… Business leaders, politicians, and planning professionals cooperated in this process, and their efforts were promoted by private coalitions of civic leaders such as the Allegheny Conference in Pittsburgh, the Municipal Housing and Planning Council of Chicago, and the Citizen’s Council on City Planning in Philadelphia. These groups were controlled by the economic elites of each city….[94]

 

In essence, we suggest the Progressive Coalition created defined a “program”, whose central element was eminent domain, to solve a defined set of public problems and sold it to their citizenry–and in the process created a backdrop of consensual public policy to support future court decisions. Also, there existed a very real link between comprehensive planning and its support of, and justification for, the required use of eminent domain (and zoning as well) to achieve the objectives of comprehensive planning. Any benefits to be achieved by a comprehensive plan would overcome any small disadvantages incurred by expansion of eminent domain into urban renewal. Implicitly, the consensus behind the rationalization, legal defense and subsequent enhanced use of eminent domain reflected, despite an obvious divergence in goals and purpose, a coalition of Progressive and Privatist actors:

 

the 1940’s renewal advocates had created a detailed program for urban revitalization. The basic tenets of urban renewal held that in order to protect property values and promote the efficient growth of urban areas, cities needed a comprehensive plan for redevelopment. The plan would designate the areas to be reclaimed and what types of projects would be built in each district. The actual development would be carried out privately, but the government would be an important partner. To keep acquisition costs down, eminent domain powers, along with government subsidies were necessary.[95]

 

As state legislatures across the nation in the post-World War II period approved redevelopment acts which included this expanded notion of urban renewal throughout the forties and early fifties[96], and municipalities responded by creating and initiating urban renewal programs, the courts inevitably were called upon to review various aspects of the urban renewal project–most importantly for us, the validity of the urban renewal as a legitimate public use/purpose in an eminent domain taking.

 

In these post-war years, Pritchett cited seventeen state courts that had reviewed and decided on various urban renewal-related eminent domain cases. All but three upheld the rights of local authorities to condemn land and turn it over to private parties for renewal purposes.[97]

 

The success of renewal initiatives in state courts depended on a coordinated effort of real estate interests and housing reformers. The NAREB, the National Association of Housing Officials, the National Conference of Mayors and other pro-redevelopment groups provided assistance to state and local authorities, helped to draft briefs, and submitted their own amicus curiae briefs to the courts. Courts relied heavily on these briefs in writing their opinions, and many of them directly appropriated the language of blight.[98]

 

Accordingly, a coalition of privatist and progressive actors re-forged, re-defined, and re-justified eminent domain to render it suitable for use in urban renewal programs. To be sure, the usual process was for the state to pass a redevelopment law, see it contested in court, and if the court review and decision were favorable urban renewal went forward. In those instances where the court’s decision was unfavorable, the redevelopment law was modified or (usually in cases where the state constitution itself made reference relevant to eminent domain) a popular referendum (in Georgia) was approved and the state constitution amended. Eventually, to our best determination, nearly every state approved and legally sanctioned some form of urban renewal–certainly by the 1960’s.

The federal Supreme Court eventually in its 1954 Berman v. Parker decision upheld the state legislation and state court decisions that affirmed public taking (in regards to a Washington D.C. taking) of private property and its transference to a private developer as part of the urban renewal process. The Supreme Court decision stated in part:

 

It is within the power of the legislature to determine that the community should be beautiful as well as healthy, spacious as well as clean, well-balanced as well as carefully patrolled …. Once the object is within the authority of Congress [the legislature of Washington D.C.], the right to realize it through the exercise of eminent domain is merely a means to an end.[99]

 

Yikes, and specters of Kilo should come to the reader’s eyes–but more on that later. This is not the end of our eminent domain story. But this is as far as we need take it at this point in our history of economic development. The reader can expect to see eminent domain discussed yet further in subsequent chapters.

 

The lessons to this point are hopefully, clear. A patchwork coalition of privatist and progressive actors throughout the 1940’s and 50’s had incorporated eminent domain into their vision of an urban renewal program which was designed to positively address the urban crisis which confronted most American cities of any size or consequence. The package which was urban renewal varied from city to city, state to state[100], but did include a core “rationale”, “approach”, or “philosophy” around which a court could legitimize its decision to allow a public taking on behalf of a private action. There were important and loud critics of these decisions, even within the time period at hand, but they were not sufficient to overcome the force or the logic of this Progressive Coalition. As we shall see soon enough, however, the double-edged sword which is eminent domain will return to haunt the urban renewal proponents in the not-too-distant future.

 

 

PART I:

SUMMARY

 

 

So what are the takes away from our first four chapters which have both introduced our approach to this history and carried us forward through 1933?  One thought is that the past does offer value in our understanding of contemporary economic development. A second thought might be that history is more than valuable; it is essential and necessary to an understanding of what is going on out there today. But, the Curmudgeon guesses that would be self-serving.

 

The most fundamental lesson for an economic developer is that both the practice and the theory behind economic development hugely reacts to and reflects the various dynamic forces which propel our society and economy. Secondly, all cities, states and regions do not react to identical dynamic forces in precisely identical ways. Sub-state economic development does not occur in a vacuum and there is immense variation among our individual communities and states. It seems that while economic development responds to forces outside the community, the particular response to these forces is often shaped and propelled by forces within each community. What’s more, that individual community variation in response is not only affected by obvious variables such as population size, but is also affected by (1) political culture distinctions represented by our two ships of economic development: Privatism and Progressivism; and (2) by the extent to which the community perceives itself as growing or declining–and population, not jobs, seems most critical to that perception. The perception of community decline seems, if the South is any guide, to generate the most intense economic development program and policy reaction. Decline is very much associated with strategy and program innovation.

 

At first glance, the most powerful external force involves the movement of people–immigration and internal migration. Population change either means a growing (or probably low wage) labor force, or its opposite, population loss, threatens the viability of the community itself–at minimum it can be perceived by community residents as a rejection of their home town (this is especially true of population loss is disproportionately composed of the young and those perceived as most productive-promising). Population change seems to be a core, perhaps the core, factor which generates economic development policy.

 

Moreover, population migration change which crosses state and especially regional boundaries, almost simultaneously affecting a mass of neighboring communities, seems especially threatening or gratifying–depending upon whether your community is on the losing or gaining end of the transaction. Widespread shared population decline seems to prompt a larger, more uniform regional response. The Great Migration arguably set in motion a Southern economic development state and local set of strategies designed to cope with its seemingly unstoppable exodus. Immigration, on the contrary, generated societal pressures and economic expansion. The community’s need for to mitigate the former and increase the latter.

 

Population change, either migration or immigration, sometimes after a considerable time lag can prompt significant physical redevelopment programs: the City Beautiful movement is a reaction to turn of the century immigration and housing reform/slum clearance in large measure more associated with the effects of the Great Migration on the Northeast and Midwestern big cities. Population migration into unsettled geographies obviously provided an opportunistic setting for city-building entrepreneurs who after setting into place an initial infrastructure then engaged in a rather intense promotion campaign.

 

Geographies suffering from population decline may well attempt population recruitment strategies, but in the Pre-Depression period, these were rather infrequent and not especially successful. The BAWI-Mississippi program, however, pioneered an innovative tool, the IDB wrapped into a more sophisticated set of incentives which included the provision of facilities and equipment in an attempt to “buy a payroll” for unemployed workers in their area. BAWI and the Kentucky programs (as well as Carolinas textile-related efforts) developed a focused “recruitment” program, in some case involving the assistance of site-selector-like firms for targeted specific firms and industries. Population change also fueled the development of a new neighborhood-level community center approach to economic development. This approach, while providing and enhancing some physical infrastructure, relied more upon people improvement-empowerment programs to improve the lives of residents in a specific sub-municipal geography.

 

Immigration, on the other hand, generated in our pre-1933 period a different set of economic development responses. Large scale immigration is clearly association with a community’s need to (1) integrate the new residents, in this period low wage, and unskilled into the larger community fabric–a fabric which often seems threatened by the older, traditional populations. Also, (2) large scale population increase compels infrastructure (and sometimes association infrastructure modernization) installation and development-redevelopment. Infrastructure of all types becomes a foremost economic development strategy. Immigration (3) creates a need for jobs and sensitivity to image and a community’s “place in the sun”–the invisible pecking order within the so-called hierarchy of cities. Recruitment and attraction of firms, as well as still more residents, is a notable feature of growing communities. Copy-cat program innovation, the flurry of world’s fairs and design competitions associated with the City Beautiful movement and the intensity of harbor and ports competition in Western coastal municipalities supports the notion that growing communities get caught up in creating still more growth.

 

A second, perhaps powerful source of change hits a community in the form of a time-lagged corrosive rot of jobs from a hitherto agglomeration of prosperity-producing industry or a hyperbolic steroidal burst of employment from an industry seemingly rising from the bare ground. As now usual, a growth in such jobs generates community and business hopes for even more growth–and the loss of jobs fosters lost hope and prosperity tinged by an ever-increasing paranoia of job-theft by the community’s economic rival and despised enemy. Industries and sectors, especially industrial and technological, as will be suggested shortly by Ann Markusen (and others) proceed through a cycle of profits which generate jobs, consolidate them and finally lose them to productivity in a desperate effort to maintain sales based on highly competitive pricing. Eventually, the industry and the firms within it fail. Becoming the private firm equivalent of a ghost town. Communities whose economic base is disproportionately saturated with an industry sector ride their job base and prosperity much like a bucking bronco in a rodeo or Gilley’s.

 

Agglomeration and profit cycle industry pressures also yielded some impressive pioneering initiatives such as scientific management, business schools, and community colleges with specific vocational school training. The latter were the earliest seeds of an independent workforce strategy which would solidify in the sixties and seventies. The onslaught of a new oligopolistic gazelle, the auto and truck industry, would create a true regional cluster centering on Motown-Detroit, Southern Michigan, and the Great Lakes. There was no discernible public program or economic development strategy or approach which was associated with this agglomeration.

 

New England’s efforts to cope with a rapidly declining textile cluster prompted a true regional promotion and capacity-building initiative led by a pioneering EDO-structural type, the regional EDO. Alternatively, declining communities were left largely to their fate, and unemployed workers were provided little assistance and no retraining. The textile firms which failed, downsized, or actually shifted production to the Carolinas were not targeted for special assistance and together with low wage Southern labor and low tax Southern communities were portrayed as villains. Instead, regional programs engaged in more confidence building, reassurance programs attempting to convince residents and resident businesses alike of the region’s continued vitality and diversified economy.

 

 

Simple membership in a free enterprise, capitalist economy seems to generate inherent competitive inter-municipal and inter-state pressures to attract and retain private firms–a sort of testosterone-like entrepreneurial vitality. A my home town is better than yours mentality that needs to win its Friday night football game to prove something to itself seems to reside in many communities across the nation. Economic development in such an atmosphere is a safeguard to the community, at least its business community, protecting its status and place in the perceived urban hierarchy and demonstrating to all its economic muscularity. To put some parameters, ensure fair and competent competition on this urban hierarchical rivalry, a national association of economic developers was formed. This national association was meant to both referee the instinctive entrepreneurial aggression and educate its participants. Also evident in the later stages of the City Beautiful era was an inter-city race to construct spectacular convention centers, monuments and parks–less for private recreation than for attracting tourists and garnering prestige.

 

Age, time, demographic transition, and technological-productivity innovation exerts an almost inevitable obsolescence in a community’s infrastructure. The “community wheel” needs to be reinvented periodically, sometimes generationally. The need to “modernize” is a constant in community’s long time story. Every so often the old infrastructure, downtown CBD needs an injection of “what’s happening now” to create both excitement and a physical base from which contemporary business models and production technology can effectively compete. Unfortunately, modernization is a double-edge sword, inevitably inflicting pain on whatever remains amid the aged infrastructure. The benefit of community and business renewal and the undeniable loss of vitality exhibited by the old usually drive a community to periodically clear out the obsolete and install the “latest and greatest”. The City Efficient replacing dirt streets with paved and installing not only pipes and wires, but a new structural and managerial governance to replace what had worked so well for nearly a hundred years.

 

In a sub-state economic development system governed by Dillon’s Law, a final and fifth external driving force emanates from state government. During the early years of our Republic, that state government and its authority-programs were more or less controlled by the municipalities themselves and delegated to the municipalities for implementation. The industrial revolution and national expansion changed all that. The powers of the national government increased and the federal government came to be perceived as a rival to state government. States began to compete among themselves for jobs, taxes, and population and the need for an infrastructure and resources beyond the capacity of even its largest city also arose. Slowly and unevenly some states, oftentimes Southern states more than other regions, were at first prodded, than later more willingly became active players in some segment of economic development.

 

And so thus far in our incomplete history we have witnessed to some degree at least five dynamic forces (regional and population change, agglomeration and profit cycle evolution, urban hierarchical entrepreneurialist competition, the need for community modernization, and state policy direction) that have generated economic development programs and strategies. In future chapters, we will see three more dynamic pressures roll out: labor force competitiveness, small business formation, and the most controversial of all–suburbanization. So long as there is a future, we can count on more history to provide opportunities for yet additional thus far unseen forces to show themselves.

 

Against these economic and social pressures for change and survival, communities have responded with distinctive economic development strategies, programs and tools deemed appropriate to counter the pressure, opportunity or threat. Urban hierarchical entrepreneurial competition seems to have been best expressed by the chamber-dominated incentive-tax abatement attraction, promotion, recruitment and retention strategies. During the pre-Depression era, this pressure seemed to be confined to and played out at the municipal level and local government was a secondary player in alliance with the privately governed chamber of commerce industrial department. Promotional programs were applied to two targets: tourists and targeted firms and sectors. The effect of all these forces on the structure of economic development is just beginning, but chambers, real estate exchanges, port authorities and planning departments do not seem to be mere organizations–they reflect and contain the reaction to the societal dynamics and change of their home communities. Structures, EDOs embody much more than programs and even staff–but that is a topic for which we need more history to better understand.

 

But it does seem apparent that the goals of economic development in the pre-1933 period, however tempered by strategies, tools, staff and EDO type, are quite different from those which seem to be practiced in contemporary America. Job creation as we know it today, for instance, is virtually non-existent in this period. Infrastructure on the other hand and inter-city rivalry, not to mention the need of a developing economy to enter the twentieth century and the negative reaction of developed economies to this search for a modern, diversified industrial economy suggest that still other dynamics play a considerable role in the definition of economic goals and policy formulation as well.

 

As might be evident from our summary, some strategies could be applied, in different ways, to manage the effects of several dynamic forces. A good example is the recurrent use of some form of physical development or redevelopment programs–often combined with the installation of some infrastructure. This “Development and Infrastructure” Approach to economic development could be applied in many different environments, such as: (1) city-building; (2) initial development; (3) redevelopment (i.e. modernization and urban hierarchical entrepreneurship); and (as we shall discover in our final chapter) (4) consolidation. The Development and Infrastructure Approach be used to create a city from scratch, a neighborhood, the CBD, or a new suburb-planned community.

 

Finally there is the beginning tale of our two ships of economic development that by 1933 have traveled a considerable distance up river. Within each city and state, and certainly among the nation’s regions, the two ships have contended against each other–but in our initial historical period it is not yet clear whether one or another seems to possess some sort of natural advantage in any single municipality, state or region. Frankly, we need more evidence, more history, before we proceed much further along those lines. But it is clear, even in this early period, that each ship contains several decks–that neither Progressivism nor Privatism is a single, monolithic block of beliefs and values. It is equally clear, at least to the Curmudgeon, that there exists a clear distinction in types of economic development practiced within the traditions of each of the competing approaches. We also can suggest that the policy political culture most critical to our two ships is most affected by the nature of the beliefs-values and composition of its business community. Democrat-Republican distinctions seem less obvious and seemingly less important to economic development policy-making–at least in this period.

 

 

 

 

 

Quo Vadis

 

In the next two chapters especially, the reader will be deluged with sections devoted to some aspect of urban renewal. In fact, urban renewal will probably be viewed as a disproportionate element of the entire book. To explain this no doubt accurate perception the Curmudgeon will offer some defense of why this urban renewal “tool-strategy” consumes so much attention and space in our, all too wordy historical blather. The following bullet points constitute our defense and explanation–we hope they are sufficient to inspire the reader to trudge dutifully through the following sections:

 

• Urban renewal dominated a rather long era of American big city history: from 1933 to arguably 1987 when UDAG was terminated. In this period of time, urban renewal was either the prime economic development strategy, or was the prime strategy under attack and in decline. In either case, urban renewal was the center point of economic development in the central cities especially.
• That we have either (or both) forgotten/unaware of our urban history or frankly hate and disparage urban renewal, and those who participated in it, only make a, hopefully more balanced treatment of the strategy more necessary for today’s reader. Urban renewal carries in today’s conversation a negative legacy which obscures a certain reality that we still use urban renewal to this day–but have amended it and renamed it as redevelopment. Urban renewal is only a particular period in the history of two economic development strategies (infrastructure and redevelopment) which remains to this day as core to economic development practice and urban revitalization.
• Urban renewal as it evolved over its fifty year cycle demonstrates the interaction of our national, state and local policy process in our policy area. There is much to be learned as we can see how federalist levels of government as well as local policy actors played at the game of economic development. The assemblage, for instance, of the post-war Progressive Coalition will offer useful perspective to our current economic development policy system. Also, in this period we begin to see the serious evolution of our State-Sub-State economic development system (the “SSS”) and see displayed the essential leadership role of the state in local economic development, the amazing diffusion of economic development programs and strategies-tools among the states, and the “yin-yang” of a tension-filled relationship between the state and its sub-state EDO actors.
• We have characterized economic development as a “patchwork profession” and urban renewal is perhaps one of our very best examples which support our characterization. The interaction of actors within both streams of economic development, cooperating and competing, is responsible for much of the evolution and prominence (and durability) of this classical economic development strategy-tool.
• Finally, urban renewal is our best example of two foundation concepts underlying our book: diversity/variation and the impact of political culture on economic development policy. Urban renewal was never one, cookie-cutter-like program. There were different models and styles of urban renewal programs–even within the same city at different periods of time. Today urban renewal is regarded as one-size-fits all program concepts. We believe that to be incorrect–to repeat, it was never correct. The internal politics of each individual urban renewal policy system (or regime as Dr. Stone would have it) are, while not necessarily unique, quite varied in time, actors, and purposes. We have lost that sense of variety and diversity which has proven to be an inherent feature of our economic policy system.

 

[1] Thomas O’Connor, The Hub: Boston Past and Present (Boston, Northeastern University Press, 2001) p. 93.

[2] O’Connor, op. cit. pp. 102-103

[3] While our conception of Progressivism follows more traditional interpretations reasonably, the reader should understand our purposes is to adjust the complex and multiple-faceted late nineteenth and early twentieth century Progressive movement to contemporary economic development policy and professional history. We see continuities in Progressive style economic development, flowing from this period into contemporary economic development, which offer understanding to the historical evolution of economic development. They key factor underlying our different decks of the economic development-related Progressive approach is the supportive constituencies which provided the muscle and power in affecting the economic development policy-making.

[4] The reader should understand at the outset that we do not define or even link economic development with goals such as tax base-revenue raising or job creation which, for good or ill, are dominant today. We reject the notion that there exists, except in the most general and useless sense, a common set of goals for all cities which is timeless. In any period of time, cities differ in the purposes to which economic development is tasked; cities certainly differ in their goals over varying periods of time. A universal goal, such as job creation, for all economic development programs strikes the Curmudgeon as cute, convenient, but not descriptive of actual expectations placed upon the practicing economic developer.

[5] We use Olmsted as a stand in for a number of exceptional individuals who were prominent at this time or who were partners with Olmsted in his various activities. In particular, Andrew Jackson Downing and Calvert Vaux were also important figures in the early second stream.

[6] Boyer, pp. 34-35

[7] Albert Fein, Frederick Law Olmsted and the American Environmental Tradition (1972) quoted in Mohl, op. cit. p. 75.

[8] M. Christine Boyer, Dreaming the Rational City: The Myth of American City Planning (Cambridge, The MIT Press, 1994), pp. 5-6.

[9] Today, the village of Riverside is headed by a village manager and economic development lead is performed by its chamber. A Main Street program is in operation.

[10] Boyer, op. cit. p. 41. We also should mention that Olmsted laid out Brooklyn in an essentially grid pattern, with a CBD housed in a distinctive architectural focal point (the Crystal Palace) and a walkable scale.

[11] Rybczynski, op cit. p. 30.

[12] the 1857 Llewellyn Park suburb (the Ramble), thought to be the nation’s first planned suburb (and home to Edison) in New Jersey (twelve miles from New York City), usually stands on its own, more a Privatist gated community than a forerunner of the modern suburb, the Progressive planned city or even the Garden City itself.

[13] Either does the planning profession apparently. Mel Scott’s, American City Planning Since 1890 (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1969–the classic history of the profession does not mention, even in passing (we do appreciate that 1884 is before 1890) the Pullman or Sunbelt city-building we have previously described. This is for good reason, planning had little to do with that approach.

[14] Witold Rybczynski, Makeshift Metropolis: Ideas About Cities” (New York, Scribner, 2010) pp. 31-32

[15] Boyer, op. cit. p. 41.

[16] Notice Howe’s discomfort  with the “city efficient” movement which we have earlier discussed under the Privatist rubric.

[17] Frederic C. Howe, “The City as a Socializing Agency: The Physical Basis of the City: the City Plan” American Journal of Sociology, volume 17 (March 1912), pp. 590-601.

[18] IBID. pp. 590-601.

[19] Olmsted Jr. established the nation’s first graduate landscape architecture program at Harvard, first President of the American City Planning Institute and a private architect and author.

[20] Home of the West Side Tennis Club which hosted the U.S. Open until 1978 and in 2007 voted by Cottage Living as the “best cottage community. Residence of Anthony Weiner; see Mel Scott, American City Planning since 1890 (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1969) pp. 90-91.

[21] Rybczynski, op. cit., pp. 33-36. The Curmudgeon senses some compatibility with these designs and those of the “New Urbanism” of the 1990’s.

[22] Some examples of future imitation of the garden city include: Kohler Wisconsin, industrial villages in Camden, New Jersey, Worcester, Massachusetts, Erwin, Tennessee, Wilmington, Delaware, John Nolen’s garden suburb of Mariemont Ohio (outside Cincinnati)  and several in Bridgeport Connecticut. Other examples are Venice, Florida, Shaker Heights in Cleveland, the County Club District in Kansas City and the well-known Palos Verdes Estates south of Los Angeles. In the late 1920, planners Clarence Stein and Henry Wright used garden city concepts to build Sunnyside Gardens in the Queens and Radburn in suburban New Jersey. See Rybczynski, op. cit., pp. 37-39.

[23] For all this, and much that will follow we are indebted to Witold Rybczynski, Makeshift Metropolis: Ideas About Cities” (New York, Scribner, 2010) especially Chapter 4: “Mr. Wright and the Disappearing City). The above quotes are taken from pp. 67-69.

[24] Frank Lloyd Wright, The Disappearing City (New York, William Farquhar Payson, 1932).

[25] Rybczynski, op. cit. pp. 71-72.

[26] Rybczynski, op. cit. pp. 75-76.

[27] By 1903 (Pingree served as Governor until 1901) Ford, Packard, Chrysler, Dodge, William Durant and others developed in the Detroit metro area during the nineties.

[28] Melvin G. Holli, Reform in Detroit: Hazen S. Pingree and Urban Politics (New York, 1969) quoted in Mohl, op. cit. p.123. Dennis R. Judd, The Politics of American Cities, op. cit. pp. 74-79 offer an excellent description of Pingree and social reformers as well.

[29] Pingree was quoted in Mohl, op. cit. p. 123.

[30] As of 2013 there are an estimated 2000 municipally-owned utilities remaining in the United States. See Five Star Consultants, “Municipal Electric Utilities: Analysis and Case Studies” www.fivestarconsultants.com

[31] Mohl, op. cit. pp. 124-127. Schenectady, New York also elected George Lunn as a socialist mayor in 1911. Minneapolis did also in 1916. Other cities with socialist mayors included Haverhill Massachusetts, Lackawanna New York, Flint Michigan, Granite City, Illinois and Butte, Montana all between 1910 and 1920.

[32] See Thomas Kessner, Fiorello H. LaGuardia and the Making of Modern New York, (New York McGraw-Hill, 1989); Alyn Brodsky, the Great Mayor: Fiorello LaGuardia and the Making of the City of New York (New York, Truman Talley, 2003); and Mason B. Williams, City of Ambition: FDR, LaGuardia, and the Making of Modern New York (New York, W.W. Norton & Company, 2013). Apparently his biographers agree that LaGuardia was responsible for the “making of New York City”.

[33] Again, Mel Scott’s chapter, “The Heyday of the City Beautiful” presents the City Beautiful period as seen through the planning prism. To the extent that Progressive economic development will dovetail with the planning profession for more than two generations, that history does have relevance to our economic development profession as well. We will, however, tend less to repeat Scott’s presentation than to draw from it (and others) the more economic development aspects of the City Beautiful. No claim is made that we are trying to describe the entirety of City Beautiful anymore than the entirety of the planning profession. We are culling out of this period only what, to us, appears of interest to the economic developer. This, also, was the age of professionalism as well as Progressivism. In this period the National Municipal League, the action arm of local progressives, (1894) was formed. Within two years the NML had 180 local municipal organizations as members. Alongside the NML was the National Civic Foundation (1900), the American Economic Association (1885), the National Housing Association (1910), the National Association of Settlements (1911), the American Political Science Association (1903), the American Institute of Planners (1909), the U.S. Chamber of Commerce (1912), and many others such as the National Association of Port Authorities, the National Conferences of Mayors and City Managers, and the Municipal Finance Officers Association all came into existence and are still around in some form today.

 

[34] Boyer, op. cit., p. 43.

[35] Jon A. Peterson, “The City Beautiful Movement: Forgotten Origins and Lost Meanings”, Journal of Urban History, Volume 2, Number 4, August 1976, Sage Publications, p. 422.

[36] Peterson, op. cit., p. 422. Peterson observes that many of these New England associations “were anxious to capture the summer trade”–i.e. for those associations the city beautiful was very much a tourism strategy.

[37] Craig Turnbull, An American Urban Residential Landscape, 1890-1920: Chicago in the

[38] He later added several important works such as Improvement of Towns and Cities and his classic, Modern Civic Art.

[39] Witold Rybczynski, Makeshift Metropolis: Ideas about Cities (New York, Scribner, 2010) pp. 16-17; the first quote is Robinson’s drawn from  Improvement in City Life (Atlantic Monthly).

[40] Robinson was actually a member of the board of the American League of Civic Improvement and the American Civic Association board as well. His concepts deeply affected both the emerging planning movement and  were adopted by the newly founded American Society of Landscape Architects. See Rybczynski, op. cit. pp. 18-19.

[41] Witold Rybczynski, Makeshift Metropolis op. cit. p. 23.

[42] Peterson, op. cit, pp. 425-430.

[43] We are using Mel Scott, op. cit. and his chapter, “Boosters, Builders and Planners” as well as Mohl, op, cit. pp. 78-80

[44] Mel Scott, op. cit. p. 36.

[45] Mohl, op. cit. p. 79.

[46] Mel Scott, op. cit. p. 62.

[47] Rybczynski, op. cit. p. 25.

[48] Scott, op. cit. p. 45.

[49] Mansel G. Blackford, The Lost Dream: Businessmen and City Planning on the Pacific Coast 1890-1920 (Columbus, Ohio, the Ohio State University Press, 1993), pp. 38-40.

[50] Blackford, op. cit. pp. 40-41.

[51] Blackford, op. cit. p. 46.

[52] Blackford, op, cit. pp. 49-50

[53] Steinberger, op. cit. p. 27

[54] A little background may be in order. First, the role and authority of the federal government while paramount in interstate commerce and foreign export trade (i.e. “what” can be traded and how “the what” may legally be traded) does not extend to the physical facilities of trade. The federal government has little legal control over the port facilities themselves. In fact, the facilities fall under the authority of states (or localities if delegated by the states) and hence the states are the primary regulator of the physical infrastructure associated with trade. Secondly, some ports are not managed by port authorities, even today (New Haven Connecticut for example) but by private corporations and subsidiaries of larger corporations. Some private port-related corporations are even foreign-owned and trade on foreign stock exchanges. Much of the physical infrastructure of trade remains in private hands to this day. The reader, therefore, should be prepared to make the distinction between privately-owned port facilities and publicly regulated and presumably controlled port authorities. Perhaps more important, the reader should also be flexible and recognize (as we shall describe in later chapters) that the “port authority” has evolved into something much more expansive than simple control over harbor and waterfront activities. Currently, many port authorities have expanded into airport management, intermodal centers and logistical empires. Most economic developers think of these behemoths as “transportation authorities”–and they are, but they are also formidable economic development agencies who often employ rather conventional economic development programs and strategies. Usually, port authorities (again, frequently including airports) today include a tax advantaged, foreign trade zone, industrial parks, and a tax abated incentive promotion program alongside its transshipment, break bulk and intermodal facilities (wharves, docks, railroads and warehouses).

[55] The American Association of Port Authorities was formed in 1912.

[56] EDOs we shall argue consistently in this history may draw their roots from either Privatism or Progressivism, but structures being essentially vehicles carrying programs and tools, can serve multiple, even contradictory, ends and goals.

[57] Brian Lloyd Azcona, “The Razing Tide of the Port of New Orleans: Power, Ideology, Economic Growth and the Destruction of the Community”, Social Thought and Research, Volume 27, www.kuscholarworks.ku.edu,  p.80

[58] Brian Lloyd Azcona, “The Razing Tide of the Port of New Orleans: Power, Ideology, Economic Growth and the Destruction of the Community”, Social Thought and Research, Volume 27, http://www.kuscholarworks.ku.edu

[59] As support we cite the “Port of Portland” Oregon Encyclopedia, “The first board of fifteen commissioners appointed by the (state) legislature, represented the Portland business elite, with William S. Ladd as the first commission President.

[60] James A. Fawcett, “Port Governance and Privatization in the United States: Public Ownership and Private Operation, Chapter 10, Research in Transportation Economics, Volume 17, 2007, p. 211.

[61] For example, we shall focus attention upon the Oregon Port Law of 1909, the Milwaukee, Wisconsin Port Authority (1909) and the Washington State Port District Act of 1911. Long Beach and Los Angeles, as well as Houston, Texas were other port authorities formed in that four year period. There were others as well.

[62] “Port of Portland”, Oregon Encyclopedia, op. cit. p. 1.

[63]  Some examples are: Seattle (1911), Grays Harbor (1911), Vancouver Washington (1912), Tacoma (1918),          Bellingham (1920), Everett Washington (1917), Kalama Washington (1921), Longville Washington (1921),    Olympia (1922), Longville Washington (1922), Anacortes Washington (1926)

[64] WWW.HistoryLink.org — the Free Online Encyclopedia of Washington State History.

[65] IBID. p. 2 A Progressive leader in port legislation was Virgil G. Bogue who would later draft waterfront plans for Seattle and Grays Harbor and Tacoma. His motivation was to create coordinated public ownership “as practiced by European ports”.

[66] Jesse H. Jones, later allegedly called “Jesus H. Jones” by FDR turned down several offers by Wilson to be in his administration. He headed the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (for Hoover) and later became FDR’s Secretary of Commerce. He was seriously considered for the 1940 Vice Presidential nomination. His PAC, the Suite 8F Group, contributed mightily to political careers of folk such as John Connolly and Lyndon Baines Johnson.

[67] This movement was very active through World War I, formed a national association, the Community Center Association, and attached itself to the newly emerging discipline of sociology (most associated with the Chicago School of Sociology). The American Sociological Association and the Community Center Association met jointly in 1923. The movement started by urging public schools in neighborhoods to let their playgrounds be used for general neighborhood resident use and then moved onto the construction of community centers which could serve a variety of resident needs including neighborhood meetings, adult education, and recreation. “Every school house [was to be] a community capital, and every community a little democracy” was its public goal. See Howard Gillette, Jr., “The Evolution of Neighborhood Planning: From the Progressive Era to the 1949 Housing Act”, Journal of Urban History, Volume 9, Number 4, August 1983, pp. 421-444.

[68] The settlement movement’s golden years were between 1880 and 1920. The idea was to build “settlement houses” in poor neighborhoods where middle class volunteers would live, share values, alleviate poverty and provide health services, daycare, education and serve as role models to neighborhood residents. By 1913, it was claimed that 413 such settlement houses were in operation in 32 states (H. Husock, “Bring Back the Settlement House”, Public Welfare, Volume 51 (1993), Number 4). Jane Adam’s Hull House is a prominent example and the PBS-BBC “Call the Midwife” is a visual depiction of an English urban facility much like a settlement house. Dorothy Day’s Catholic Workers hospitality houses continued this tradition through the Depression years.

[69] Gillette, Jr. op. cit. p.423.

[70] Gillette, Jr. op. cit. pp. 423-424. Henry Wright was intricately involved with this St Louis plan. Charles Mulford Robinson endorsed civic center movement and by the 1920’s the movement was very much included in planning journals and the profession. Boston’s Mary Follett and Robert Woods were also prominent advocates of this movement.

[71] Gillette, Jr. op cit. p. 425.

[72] Quote in Gillette Jr., p.427 from Architectural Record (January, 1932), p. 41.

[73]  Cited in Boyer, op. cit., p. 36

[74] There are today two schools of Chicago sociology. We refer, of course, to the first which was in its heyday before the 1940’s. Robert Park, Ernest Burgess and Roderick McKenzie, the City (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1925) is the focal point of our discussion. Edward Banfield and James Q. Wilson’s, City Politics carried that perspective into the sixties and extended it to political science. One can perhaps argue that this approach took a turn with Roger S Ahlbrandt, Jr. and James V. Cunningham, A New Public Policy for Neighborhood Preservation (Praeger, 1079) and with Anthony Downs, Neighborhoods and Urban Development (Washington D.C., Brookings Institution Press, 1981) who plugs in an “arbitrage” model to neighborhoods succession.

[75] See for example, Hanlon and Hanlon and Vicino.

[76] George Sternlieb, Patterns of Development (New Brunswick, New Jersey, Rutgers Center for Urban Policy Research, 1986) pp. 6-7.

[77] Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives (Kessinger Publishing, 2004) and the Battle with the Slums (New York, MacMillan, 1895).

[78] Marc A. Weiss, “The Origins and Legacy of Urban Renewal” in Federal Housing Policy and Programs: Past and Present *J. Paul Mitchell, ed., Center for Urban Policy Research, 1985.  p. 256.

[79] Ernest J. Bohn, “Housing as a Political Problem”, Law and Contemporary Problems, Volume, Number 2 (March, 1934), pp. 178.

[80] Today the NAREB is known as (since 1974) the National Association of Realtors as is considered a powerful lobby force–as it was in the 1930’s as well.

[81] For example we cite an interesting assessment of Cleveland’s response  by Ernest J. Bohn, former President of National Association of Housing Officials, “Housing as a Political Problem”, Law and Contemporary Problems, Volume, Number 2 (March, 1934), pp. 176-184. Bohn in frustration rails against the inability of public housers to arouse public opinion on the public housing issue and that subsequent New Deal legislation which advanced the public housing interests were justified on the need to create opportunities for employment. He also in detail outlines the local responses to Hoover’s 1932 initiatives and the early New Deal housing legislation. This is a short but very enlightening article.

[82] Alexandra B. Klass, “The Frontier of Eminent Domain”, Regulation, Summer 2008, pp. 21-22.

[83] Klass, op. cit. p. 22.

[84] Klass, op. cit. pp. 22-23

[85] Wendell E. Pritchett, “The ‘Public Menace’ of Blight: Urban Renewal and the Private Uses of Eminent Domain”, Yale Law and Policy Review, Volume 21, Number 1, 2003 pp. 7-8.

[86] Pritchett, op. cit. pp. 11-12.

[87] Pritchett, op. cit. p. 14.

[88] Mabel Walker, Urban Blight and Slums (1936)

[89] Robert Park, Ernest Burgess and R. D. McKenzie were the leaders in this new conception of sociology.

[90] Pritchett, op. cit. p. 18.

[91] Pritchett, op. cit. p. 19

[92] Pritchett. Op. cit. pp. 24-25

[93] Pritchett, op. cit. p. 25.

[94] Pritchett, op. cit. p. 27. Pritchett then describes individual cities and their campaigns to promote this overall package to the citizen and voter–creating the backdrop for inclusion into a court decision.

[95] Pritchett, op. cit. p.32.

[96] New York was the allegedly the first (1941-Desmond-Mitchell Urban Redevelopment Corporation Law), Illinois next and by 1948 twenty-five states had passed such legislation.–Pritchett, op. cit. p. 32. Pritchett in the following pages describes the essential features of several of these laws and their differences. Despite the ULI “model law” approach, each state was approaching urban redevelopment through its own perspective and balance of political and social inputs.

[97] Pritchett, op. cit. p. 38.

[98] Pritchett, op. cit. p. 38.

[99] Urban Blight: An Analysis of State Blight Statutes and their Implications for Eminent Domain Reform, by Robinson and Cole for the National Association of Realtors, October 2007.  p. 5.

[100] The reader is urged to review a publication, Urban Blight: An Analysis of State Blight Statutes and their Implications for Eminent Domain Reform, by Robinson and Cole for the National Association of Realtors, October 2007. This publication outlines in nearly fifty pages the various distinctions and variations included in the fifty state laws governing eminent domain and blight. In addition, it does provide a short history of the period we have just discussed and which confirms the basic outlines of our position.