Two paths diverge: take one

As the chapter title suggests, with American economic development there are two quite distinguishable paths: “mainstream economic development” and “community development.” It is tempting to think of the former as Privatist and the latter Progressive. That would not be correct, at least as how this history presents it. There are Privatist versions of community development and community development can play the mainstream economic development game if it wants. Still, the reader would not be major league off-track if he/she perceived mainstream economic development as predominantly Privatist in spirit and practice, and community development as predominantly Progressive leaning. Tiptoeing onto both paths are the twin specters of partisanship and ideology—a combined horror which the history collapses into a four-letter word: “politicization.”

The link between these two paths and our two ships (political culture) is both obvious and tenuous. The Policy and Practitioner World actors display a poor sense of the future they portend. They are justifiably rooted in their own contemporary world, not in my twenty-first-century hindsight. So we all must be patient. We start out in this chapter with the community development path which during these years (1880–1910 or so) is a blend of people- and placed-based ED—as it is today. CD’s Progressive roots are showing in its concern for immigrant outcasts and society’s disadvantaged. The “place” is the neighborhood, but citywide CD strategies are also being launched by social reform and socialist mayors. Even in this early period, the persistent fragmentation or diversity of CD strategies is quite evident.

Mainstream ED is next. It is the dominant of the two paths during these years. Mainstream ED has an overarching theme, physical redevelopment, which is believed to be the best strategy to “grow the city” and to bring about economic growth that benefits all segments of the community, as well as induce immigrants to play nicely in the American capitalist sandbox. Physical redevelopment slides over into people-based CD also. Both paths are attempting in their way to include the millions of immigrants. For mainstream ED advocates, their physical redevelopment strategy, the City Beautiful, has the additional benefit of revitalization and refunctioning of the Big City CBD. It marks the first attempt to deal with the expanding Big City periphery.

As background, these decades were the heart and soul of the Progressive Era. They were, of course, also decades characterized by massive waves of immigrants. I might toss World War I into the mix as well. Because it was relatively short as wars go, the effect of the war on the economy, prosperity and labor were transitory, amounting to a head-fake. World War I’s most consequential impacts on this history seem to be after it is over. By war’s end America has hesitantly entered the world arena, replacing Germany as the world’s most industrial economy.

NEW BEGINNINGS: COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT

Let’s provide some definition to the “community development approach” (CD). The one compelling characteristic that separates community development from “mainstream” economic development is community development focuses on “people”— helping, shaping, empowering, mobilizing and ultimately changing people. CD does not prefer to work with private business, and the well-being of the jurisdictional economic base is far from its prime concern. Mainstream economic development achieves its purposes through business firms and corporations, mostly by affecting the costs of production and providing the infrastructure for economic growth. CD achieves its purposes by helping people where they live: neighborhoods. Focusing on people has (almost) always involved “changing” people—their attitudes, values and behavior: “people growth.” Why people need to change suggests another difference between mainstream and community development—the goals each pursues.

Like mainstream economic development, community development grew from several disparate, semi-related seeds. The CD garden includes lots of different flowers which, over time, have cross-fertilized—blending and blurring in ways that obscure their separate, distinct and independent histories (and purposes). To mix a metaphor, CD compares to Russian Matryoshka nested dolls. Within the outside large doll are a number of smaller dolls. Not all the dolls work well with each other. In this chapter, several versions of community development will appear. The following will be discussed: social welfare strategies; neighborhood-based approaches; citywide models; and African-American community development.

Social Welfare Community Development

To make the point early that CD can be Privatist as well as Progressive, “social welfare CD” developed alongside the first post-Civil War immigrant streams. Not all capitalists took delight at watching immigrants and the desperately poor starve. Philanthropy existed, and any number of efforts to feed and care for the sick, aged and unemployed characterized the Gilded Age. From newspaper campaigns and church soup kitchens, to elite-supported anti-poverty organizations, such as New York City’s Society for Improving the Condition of the Poor, people did what they could. Gilded Age Privatist social welfare community development jelled in reaction to the early 1870s’ initial flood of immigrants and the 1873 Panic (Depression). Perhaps the earliest was the YMCA movement, started in 1864 New York City, offered a gym and upstairs residence. Inspired by Chicago’s Dwight Moody, Ys constructed large, fully equipped, staffed gyms, baths, bowling alleys and residential dormitories in nine of America’s ten largest cities by 1885 (McKelvey, 1963, pp. 147–8).

Remembered as “the Long Depression,” the Panic of 1873 triggered an explosion of relief programs. The above NYC Society for Improving qualified 5000 for relief in 1873; by 1874 it was 24,000. Throughout the decade it averaged in excess of 20,000 families annually. The sheer number of private campaigns, still inadequate relative to the need, invited abuse, inefficiency, duplication and waste. None of these pathologies were well tolerated by Privatists in a Privatist age. The Buffalo Charity Organization Society (COS) offered a model that each city could adopt which addressed, in its fashion, these concerns. The first nationwide movement, the COS brought a characteristic private perspective to community development. Its target was individuals/families “deserving” of support; its purposes were to order capitalism and genuinely to assist the truly desperate.

The primary emphasis of the COS movement was “a scientific approach … the use of investigation, registration, and supervision of applicants … [it] coordinated resources and activities of private philanthropies and establishment of centralized ‘clearinghouses’ or registration bureaus that collected information about individuals and families receiving assistance” (Hansan, 2013, n.p.). Building upon Boston’s original 1876 Social Service Exchange (a clearinghouse), COS went beyond to actual follow up with recipients with a “house-to-house visitation,” an evaluation of its effectiveness, and feeding back the information into a planning process for the next year. Home inspectors were trained, and were later incorporated into the early social worker casework method. A community-level “governing council” composed of representatives from district/ neighborhood councils, contributors and charitable organizations oversaw the program. Each district office had a paid executive and a system of volunteer committees.

The model was taken from the 1869 London COS by an episcopal rector from Buffalo (NY) who, after spending the 1877 summer in attendance, brought it back to Buffalo that fall. By 1882 there were 32 known COS-like organizations in cities whose population totaled 12 percent of the nation (almost 7 million). Expanding consistently across the nation, they formed a National Conference of Charities and Corrections. In 1887 Denver adopted its “federated fundraising” approach, and that further fueled growth of the COS model—a model that adapted to the needs of each community. In 1913 Cleveland expanded the model by organizing a single citywide funding campaign that funneled its proceeds to approved charitable organizations, and enlisted the active participation of business in its implementation as well as funding campaign. The Cleveland innovation is regarded as the first “Community Chest,” which in its turn spread across the nation as well. The Community Chest would continue (through the Depression) into the post-World War II era. In 1961 the Community Chest movement changed its name to United Way—which continues to the present day.

Today “faith-based” CD is a legitimate wing or approach. It has a long tradition, which certainly found expression during these years. Called “social Christianity,” it was personified by Washington Gladden, initially a North Adams MA minister, now acclaimed as its “father.” Deeply concerned with the plight of the working man and urban blight, Gladden stressed it was a Christian’s responsibility to become involved and to redress abuses and poverty. He became a well-known mediator of labor strikes, and worked closely with the civic association movement to popularize that commitment. A plethora of church-based initiatives to counter the various urban problems that beset the immigrant characterized this period (McKelvey, 1963, pp. 160–66). Perhaps the most durable of these nineteenth-century faith-based movements was the Salvation Army, introduced from England in 1880, which established places of respite in nearly every sizeable immigrant slum in America’s Big Cities. Its leaders, Ballington and Maud Booth, by the time they retired in 1896, had founded a second organization, Volunteers of America, with 2000 officers and 25,000 volunteers in 17 rescue missions, 24 lodging homes and 3 farm colonies. The Catholic Church, inspired by Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 Rerum Novarum, formed the secret American Protective Association that claimed over 2 million members by 1895 (McKelvey, 1963, p. 164).

Neighborhood-Level Community Development

Several late nineteenth-/early twentieth-century Progressive reform movements instinctively gravitated into “neighborhoods.” Immigrant neighborhoods were called “slums” back then—because outsiders felt they lacked social and economic structure. Residents lived in horrible housing in unhealthy, crime-prone areas; working desperate, lowpaying jobs. Boston’s Robert Woods, a leading neighborhood reformer of the period, said the best way “to help integrate poor neighborhoods and their residents into the larger society was to first strengthen these neighborhoods and then try to link them to the outside world” (Halpern, 1995, p. 29). Cities to them were “a cluster of interlacing communities. Each having its own vital ways of expression and action, but all together creating the municipality.” A neighborhood was the only unit of society which included essentially ‘every kind of community need and the resources to meet it’’ neighborhoods were the “microcosm of all social problems” and the “ultimate testing place of all social reforms” (Melvin, 1987, p. 15).

Settlement house movement

Jane Adam’s Chicago Hull House (1889) is the best-known example of this movement, but not the first. The idea developed at London’s East End Toynbee Hall in 1884. Brought to New York City by Stanford Coit in 1886, his Neighborhood Guild was America’s first—he worked with Jewish immigrants in the Lower East Side. Graham Taylor (Chicago Commons) and Robert A. Woods (Boston’s South End House) were other notable examples. The movement built “settlement houses” in poor neighborhoods where middle/upper-class volunteers would live, instill middle-class “American” values, alleviate poverty, provide health services, recreation, daycare and education, and serve as role models. The peak of the settlement house movement was “just prior to World War I.” In 1913, 413 settlement houses were in operation in 32 states (Trolander, 1987, pp. 3–4).

The settlement house aimed to bridge understanding between the (upper) middle classes and the inner-city poor. Their nonprofit boards of directors were predominantly affluent Progressives—settlement volunteers, contributors—and boards of directors were outsiders to the immigrant neighborhood. Services provided in settlement houses varied, but the laundry list included: classes in English, civics, cooking, sewing, dressmaking, wood and sheet-metal working, legal aid, employment counseling, laundry facilities, baths, some health care, nurseries for working mothers, recreation and athletic programs, concerts and theatre and even vegetable gardens. In this cacophony settlement houses instinctively recognized that personal change meant providing a vast array of services, facilities and education—since labeled “comprehensiveness.” Comprehensiveness developed into a defining characteristic of this approach to CD.

From the beginning settlement houses were vehicles by which immigrants could be transformed into mainstream middle-class Americans. Thus settlement houses were characterized by Allen Davis (1967) as “spearheads for reform”, not mere apolitical, neighborhood-based service centers. The settlement house reformers intended their model to be nationwide so that the aggregate of their individual success could lead to fundamental social reform. Social reform meant assimilation, and assimilation meant the maintenance of a productive social order and capitalist economy.

To others, however, assimilation meant social control by business elites and Ivy League settlement house volunteers. To neighborhood residents, most of whom retained identification with machine ward politicians and ethnic church, settlement workers were oft-times “useful do-gooders” providing a “safety net.” Writer Jack London, no friend of the settlement movement, said settlement house volunteers “do everything for the poor except get off their back … They come from a race of successful and predatory bipeds who stand between the worker and his wages and try to sell the worker what he shall do with the pitiful balance left to him” (Bremner, 1964, p. 65). Trolander (1987), more charitably, observed that settlement workers work for, but are not of the neighborhood. While settlement houses had many individual successes, their net impact was in no way transformative.

Contemporary community developers draw much from the settlement house movement. That movement’s chief characteristics included:

+ a focus on “the needs of low income neighborhoods”;

+ the provision of direct and “comprehensive” array of services to residents of those neighborhoods;

+ whose ultimate purpose it was to alleviate the underlying causes of poverty and social problems on a national scale—social reform.

After World War I, settlement house volunteers were replaced by professionally trained social workers (MSW)—generating controversy that the professionalization of social workers changed the nature and direction of settlement houses.

Housing reformers

A second movement, housing reform, starts from the same period as the settlement movement—and in the same city (New York). Jacob Riis, author of the great housing–immigrant tenement reform work How the Other Half Lives (1890), is credited with popularizing housing reform in immigrant neighborhoods. Having acquired a competence on the issue by visiting with sanitary inspectors the tenements of NYC, Riis, an impoverished Danish-born immigrant, first published that title in the 1889 Christmas issue of Scribner’s. To learn how things really were “on the beat” Teddy Roosevelt, as Police Commissioner (1895), walked the districts at night. The man he took with him was Jacob Riis. Riis, who worked at the time for the New York Sun, would write an article on the previous night’s observations and TR, having his policy agenda shaped by his traveling companion, would follow up. The two were life-long friends and allies.

Housing reformers focused on one of two strategies. The first urged the passage of restrictive housing legislation that required tenement owners to fix and maintain their sub-standard housing to minimum standards as prescribed by the law. New housing was required to conform to those minimum standards. The second approach (which continues to this day) sought to create good, safe and suitable housing below its construction cost, if possible (Andrachek, 1979, pp. 159–60). Riis’s great achievement, the landmark 1895 Tenement House Act, followed the first strategy.¹ Picked up by others such as reformer Lawrence Veiller (A Model Housing Law, 1914), attacking real estate developers and the slum lords that built and owned these tenements became the primary line of attack by subsequent “housers”: “we must [first] abolish privy vaults before we build model tenements.” Watching this from afar, 13 states and many Big Cities passed laws similar to the later 1901 NYC Tenement Act; only one, Kentucky, was from the South (Andrachek, 1979, pp. 166–7).

The problem was that existing tenement complexes were beyond repair: the “dumbbell” apartment could never be suitably made safe or reasonably livable while immigrants still poured in and housing inspectors were “flexible.” Without zoning and building codes, new housing that met minimum standards did little to solve the immigrant plight, and probably only increased rents. As early as 1909, the NYC Municipal Research Bureau, after conducting a “friendly investigation,” found more than 66,000 violations (Andrachek, 1979, p. 169). Nevertheless, an almost exclusive reliance on restrictive housing legislation continued through the end of World War I (1920). It was only after criticism by the likes of Edith Elmer Wood, starting in 1919, that housers picked up the second approach which has dominated since (Wood, 1919). From that point housing reformers started down a road that led in several directions: to suburbs, master planned communities, public housing and slum clearance, urban renewal and the Great Society. Arguably, this wing of CD, at least in terms of what the reader will encounter in future chapters, had the greatest impact on not only CD but mainstream ED as well.

Riis in the meantime had moved on. He supported a theme espoused by TR that stressed exercise and the outdoor life. In depressed and congested neighborhoods the best place for kids to do this was school playgrounds. Community sports centers followed. By 1902 Riis was advocating each neighborhood utilize its public school in non-educational areas to improve neighborhood quality of life and facilitate personal development (Scott, 1969, p. 72).

The playground/recreation movement

Urban planners, notably John Nolen (and also Olmsted Jr.) joined in. “Playground” advocates thought of the Big City “as a complex of interrelated systems” in which “the arteries of circulation articulated with the larger parks … small playgrounds planned as adjuncts to the schools, the neighborhood parks and larger playgrounds distributed throughout the city” (Scott, 1969, p. 72). The Playground Association of America was formed in 1906. Playground/recreation advocates wanted to affect socialization of late childhood/early teens to reduce pathologies of the industrial city, making possible the healthy and productive development of future urban citizens and families. Playgrounds created a physical place where:

Team play [which] required … tempering of individuality to a common goal. This training socialized the child, making the child receptive to the discipline of the work environment, to an efficiently organized polity, to national patriotism, and to civic idealism … providing an alternative to the depraved, socially centrifugal city. The playground supplied the corrective for bad forms of recreation … [that could nurture] the street gang’s primitive civicism. (Wilson, 1989, pp. 81–2)

Also, in 1907, the St. Louis City Beautiful Plan centered on neighborhoods, proposing each neighborhood possess a cluster of buildings/functions including a school (including a parochial school), library, park and playground, public bath, church, police and fire station, athletic organizations and settlement house—grouped around a neighborhood downtown-like civic center. That opened up a new level of interest—in the school, not just its playground. Progressive neighborhood community developers wanted a natural entity to serve the change function; the school, they reasoned could serve as a neighborhood center and recreation area “to multiply points of contact between neighborhood residents, to foster neighborhood unity, and promote recognition of common interests on the neighborhood and city level (Melvin, 1987, p. 23).

The school/community center movement got a jump-start in 1907 Rochester (NY) by Edward Ward.² Other cities jumped on the bandwagon; in 1916 the National Community Center Association was formed. Using recreation to draw in neighborhood residents and then attempting to “educate” them on civic affairs and change-issues proved ultimately no more effective than the settlement house. Services, recreation or otherwise, did not change people in ways that led to solving underlying pathologies or to national social reform. By the end of World War I, social reformers looked at yet another model of neighborhood-based social reform—the social unit plan (to be discussed in a later chapter). In the meantime, City Beautiful provided an umbrella under which playground advocates joined forces with the parks (and planning) movements, thus drawing support from wealthy benefactors.

While not without tension, the parks and planners included playgrounds in their plans. Both movements sought to alter the socialization of urban residents. Both accepted the paradigm that physical environment (buildings and so on) could positively affect human behaviors and values useful to preservation of social order. Both accepted the primacy of experts, of planning, and had a preference for efficiency. Accordingly, “The City Beautiful advocated neighborhood playfields and was willing to concede a few acres of larger parks to playgrounds, provided the surrender did not involve the destruction of landscape values” (Wilson, 1989, p. 82).

The Pittsburgh Survey: early comprehensiveness

The Pittsburgh Survey, a major Russell Sage sociological project in cooperation with local Progressive reformers/business leaders, commenced in 1907 under the direction of Paul Underwood Kellogg. Conducted by at least 50 social science researchers, it was first released in Collier’s magazine (1909) and expanded into six books published between 1909 and 1914.³ The survey reflected the activism of these Progressive years, and was from its start intended to produce an agenda for social and economic reform/legislation. The survey demonstrates the instinctual pillar of CD that individual social change must involve change in a number of “policy areas” more or less simultaneously. Different aspects/needs of each individual interrelate, facilitating or inhibiting change. This is the essence behind CD “comprehensiveness” first evidenced in the settlement movement. The project was successful because local reformers were able to work in cooperation with Sage. Politically, Pittsburgh enjoyed a rare interlude from Republican machine politics when Democrat George Guthrie, a lawyer and long-term anti-corruption reformer, was elected mayor in 1906 (to 1909). Guthrie not only allowed the survey, but in 1907 also achieved a highly controversial merger of Allegheny County with the city—the merger was extremely unpopular but successfully withstood a number of legal challenges. Guthrie also introduced water filtration, which considerably reduced typhoid in Pittsburgh.

The survey supports my belief that growth politics involve coping with the externalities of successful growth. In the case of the Pittsburgh Survey, addressing worker conditions, safety and wage/income distribution (among many other issues) was significant. While not immediately apparent, the Pittsburgh Survey was one of the earliest attempts to understand how industrial growth affected people—an early example of workforce- and people-focused ED. This is evident from the concluding comments by its director, Paul Kellogg:

New stock, then, a mixed people, venturesome, country-bred … the potent aftermath of those great changes from household and domestic forms of production to the factory system. As each new peasantry leaves the soil, the history of the industrial revolution is repeated, but the processes are accelerated and the experience of a generation is taken on a jump [all at once] … . In Pittsburgh … Work is organized nationally. The steel center, like the mill town, is not a thing by itself. It is a step in a bigger process managed from without and owned by a multitude of non-resident stockholders … . We have the persistence of small administrative areas and old social institutions, ill-fitted to meet the demands of a great urban and industrial district … . The community and the workshop are at issue. (Kellogg, 1909)

Neighborhood Improvement Associations: bad boys on the block

I have left them to last—the bad boys of community development: neighborhood improvement associations (NIAs). Rightfully, they should have come first; they are considerably older than settlement houses and school community centers. But they draw from values different than Progressive Era reformers. NIAs developed their own set of characteristics, activities and goals. Whether membership was Privatist or Progressive, NIAs were individualist–Privatist leaning.

Fischer (1994, p. 79) cites their goals as “enhancement and protection” that include securing public services, uniform/homogenous development, control taxes, protect property values, “better” schools and quality of life. Their contemporary prodigy includes home owner/condo associations and the variety of neighborhood associations existing across our metropolitan landscape. They are the world of “Privatopia.” Contemporary economic developers use words like NIMBY; while cities like Portland (OR) build their politics and environmentalism around them. Others see in them bastions of racism. Neighborhood improvement associations have turned out to be a “many-splendored thing.”

Partly their perception as the bad boys of community development arises from “who” (and where) they are. They are frequently middle or working class, sometimes affluent—not disadvantaged except in their own mind. Moreover, they tended to form on city peripheries, along streetcar lines, in the early suburbs or unincorporated areas. Where social reform community developers placed great value on external activists/experts as staff and funders, neighborhood improvement associations seldom have staff, raise their own funds and are volunteer-led by residents. While no one has ever accused these associations of being an Athens-like polis, or even a New England town meeting, they are undisputedly neighborhood led and organic.

Like chambers of commerce, NIAs can provide services, particularly infrastructure, that overlap into ED/CD. They can be important to economic development planning, and in some post-Great Society cities they can be thought of as mini-city halls or EDOs. More usually, they function as advocate and interest group—an actor in the ED jurisdictional policy process. In later chapters their role will be to resist neighborhood change and succession; in so doing they battle Progressive community developers who advance/protect the interests of disadvantaged minorities. Probably a good measure of their bad boy image is derived from this struggle; in the minds of many they are bastions of affluence, parochialism and racism—home to Republicans.

Previous to 1920, neighborhood improvement associations were supportive of municipal annexation as the means by which much-desired infrastructure was obtained for the neighborhood. There is some evidence that the first improvement associations formed as early as the 1860s; the more defendable date is after 1880. There are excellent case studies of individual city neighborhood improvement associations after that period.⁴ NIAs often resisted ethnic political machines, and formed the basis of support for many a businessman mayor and municipal structural reformer. Some, like Chicago’s Woodlawn Improvement Association (formed in 1882), performed services (such as keeping sidewalks free of snow). I have no idea how many there were, but I strongly suspect that in the aggregate they equal, maybe exceed, chambers of commerce. The called themselves different names, and their subsequent evolution followed many, many paths.