POSTWAR SUNBELT UR
When utilized in whatever form, western and southern UR served purposes other than, or in addition to, anti-suburbanization. The Sunbelt, its central cities and CBD, willingly or not, existed within a polycentric metro area. Sunbelt hinterland strategy is not a carbon copy of hegemonic Big Cities. Atlanta, San Diego, San Antonio, Boston and Philadelphia are not in the same place at the same time. If we stop and think about it, there is little reason that Sunbelt UR should be identical to Big City UR. The regions differed in regard to key factors such as policy system change, form of government, business/corporate elite culture, preferences for housing/neighborhood, power of planners/plan, character and demographics of population mobility and sensitivity to the urban competitive hierarchy. More than anything, Big City UR was driven by decline—real, felt or imagined. Decentralization was a first-priority urban problem, and UR was the accepted solution: a “way of economic/political life” was on the brink of threatened collapse. Not so in the Sunbelt. The Sunbelt was growing—hugely.
There are several characteristics of Sunbelt urban renewal that leap out to the observer, besides growth and “a different space”. First, there is an incredible internal variation among Sunbelt major cities. For this history that is logical and consistent. There are a variety of political cultures at play in the Sunbelt, many not found in hegemonic Big Cities. Second, despite their common linkage, the Sunbelt South and Sunbelt West are not “in the same place” either—at least in the period we study in this chapter. They share war production population and economic growth to be sure, but not a lot else. Third, UR is mostly a Big City invention, and although it will be quickly adopted by the usual horde of states, the prerequisites for successful implementation are not quite in place.
Most importantly, the acceptance of and willingness to use federal funds is not in place: the consensus underlying UR—a progressively inclined corporate and business elite—is weaker to non-existent in many parts of the Sunbelt. Privatism is simply more evident once one steps out of Big City states. Studies of specific Sunbelt cities are consistent in the dominating presence of business elites, chambers and private investment in Sunbelt UR. Harvey Molotch’s growth coalition finds its strongest support in the Sunbelt during these years (Molotch, 1976). Also, the necessary host of judicial and legislative barriers to tools and programs, clarifying the state role, all needed to be overcome.
There will be a noticeable temporal lag in the Sunbelt’s actual use of UR, whether for neighborhood and housing or CBD. That brings up another major difference, the relative strength of the CBD approach rather than the housing, neighborhood CD approach. There are logical as well as cultural reasons for this. Moreover, population growth implies new residents. Many areas of the Sunbelt are drawing non-Southern Diaspora immigration and generational cohort in-migration. This complicates the approval and eventual use of UR in ways that won’t be apparent until Part III. The bottom line of these differences and distinctions is that UR will follow different goals, varying even within the Sunbelt, than Big Cities. UR served many masters during our late Transition Years.
Simultaneous Suburbanization and “Domeism”: Urban Hierarchy
Polycentric simultaneous suburbanization doesn’t mean Sunbelt central cities didn’t want eastern-style hinterland hegemony—just the opposite. Sunbelt central cities, enjoying an initial advantage, quickly discovered annexation yielded consequences and reactions they couldn’t control. By the early 1960s Sunbelt suburbs were, if anything, more autonomous than their vaunted eastern compatriots. That’s where UR enters the picture. Our Chapter 1 competitive urban hierarchy driver also crowds into that picture. UR will build office buildings, convention centers and a Seattle World’s Fair—shades of Big City 1920s City Beautiful.
Western and southern cities in this decade are reaching scales sufficient to justify Big City rank. Sunbelt cities were not trying to preserve existing urban competitive status, but rather to assert a more prestigious one—one not necessarily based on control over their powerful suburbs which, in fact, are following the same City Beautiful strategy. Journalist Calvin Trillin complained the Sunbelt cities caught an infection of “municipal domeism”—the tendency to focus civic pride on a single project of pharaonic scale. That explains the Astrodome, Kingdome and Superdome, not to mention the DallasFort Worth mega airport. It also explains a lot of convention centers with magnificent hotels. The exuberance of Peachtree is not unique to Atlanta: “In the best tradition of urban boosterism, a successful redevelopment program became a selling point in itself as a symbol of civic unity and modernity” (Abbott, 1981, p. 143). UR was that redevelopment program—for many, perhaps most, sixties Sunbelt cities the primary purpose behind the strategy.
Annexation and infrastructure were primary strategies for most western and southern cities during the 1950s. While eastern cities were lobbying and then implementing the UR of the 1949 Housing Act (and its many amendments), these cities were fishing or catching up with their civil rights. Leaving aside Oklahoma City, Portland, Tulsa and Sacramento, in other Sunbelt ponds downtown UR took off in the early–mid-1960s when it became increasingly obvious that:
- Annexation could not keep up with growth.
- Annexation and infrastructure were very expensive and time-consuming.
- Suburbs were resisting annexation in votes and in the state legislature.
There would be a few annexations in the sixties, but annexation’s day was mostly over in the West.
So CBD revitalization was the next best strategy. Its purpose was not to capture suburbs—that battle was now lost—but more to serve as an anchor for a first among equals metropolitan strategy and an assertion to the world that their city had arrived as a first-tier national city, with all the required prerequisites to compete with other Big Cities for jobs and growth. That explains municipal domeism. UR’s competitive purpose was not hidden: in the majority of western cities UR was the strategy used to stabilize the central city’s position in the metro urban hierarchy and as a debutant-style “coming out” for their arrival in the regional and national urban hierarchies (Abbott, 1981, p. Chapter 6).
As early as 1955, Downtown Tulsa Unlimited, a coalition of business leaders, advocated bond referenda approval for a civic center and land clearance for a hospital, community college and apartment and office buildings. By the late 1950s, San Francisco, Seattle and Portland were working on UR projects. Others followed. Western downtowns were less than awe-inspiring, a legacy of “smaller” days. Low rise and interlaced with skid rows and streets unfriendly to cars, most Sunbelt CBDs needed upgrading to house the headquarters of the region’s major corporations—and the facility infrastructure one expected from a Big City. At the time, a criticism within many western cities was that 1960s’ UR was nothing but a City Beautiful waste (Abbott, 2008, p. 192).
Policy System and Political Culture Variation
Sooner or later one gets into trouble speaking about “western” this and “eastern or southern” that. In a history that argues variation is a cornerstone principle, broad strokes undermine our argument. This section breaks down the broad strokes to specific regions and then cities.
In the South, cities were smaller, elites regional, closed and closely bound to the region’s more Privatist cultures. Possessing a “God bless the federal government and keep it far away from us” mentality, UR, decried as socialistic by some, was distrusted by most. Several southern states did not authorize/empower municipalities to use UR until the sixties, Louisiana as late as 1968. Public housing, associated with race/ ethnicity, with a few exceptions didn’t enjoy widespread support in the transitional, segregationist south. ED took a poor second place to desegregation and civil rights during the 1950s and 1960s. The 1965 Voting Rights Act exerted serious effects on southern municipal policy systems, requiring significant electoral changes with serious policy-making implications: replacing at-large with district elections, requiring federal approval of annexations. This was system change in its own right. UR operated within a very crowded and conflict-ridden policy agenda. When desegregation and busing traveled north in the very late 1960s our Big Cities were in “another place” (as will be discussed in Part III).
Western policy systems appeared in several varieties. Pacific Coast Big Cities were older, denser and settled by Yankees, Germans and ethnic and racial groups: progressively inclined but complex, heterogeneous policy systems not dominated by business elites but rather, like San Francisco, characterized by “hyper-pluralism” (DeLeon, 1992); or, in Portland’s case, governed by a commission form of government that found sustained action on public housing or urban renewal difficult. Los Angeles, city, county or growing suburbs like Orange County had weak mayors, strong independent public bureaucracies and overwhelming decentralization into countless suburban communities. Southern California’s settlement pattern produced a policy system, politics and culture that bore little resemblance to that of San Francisco (Wirt, 1974). In California, initiative and referendum policy-making is a central feature of the policy process, whatever the policy system—as are nonpartisan elections. Each Big City ought to be looked at separately.
Non-San Antonio Texan cities that ran in a curved line to San Diego (starting with Houston and including Dallas, Fort Worth, El Paso, Albuquerque, Phoenix and Tucson) clearly got the same memo: not to use federal funds for UR, but to conduct a privately led, planned and financed CBD redevelopment program. The outlier, Oklahoma City (related below), must have been left off the distribution list—Salt Lake City got the memo instead. In the cities that got the memo, corporate and business elites generally dominated their policy system. In several instances, their “vault-like” groups directed ED policy effectively through the turmoil of desegregation, and successfully conducted a significantly privatized version of UR, transforming their CBDs (and economic base) in masterful, if undemocratic and non-equalitarian, fashion. In these cities we can see pure, locally driven CBD rebuilding and, in some cases, an integration of new neighborhood and CD groups into the policy system. There is no mistaking any of them for Boston or Philadelphia.
A couple of eastern Big Cities (Pittsburgh and NYC) started their UR before the 1949 Housing Act, and almost every one submitted applications after the 1949 Act. As discussed, that Act was poorly designed, imperfectly administered and required mandates and procedures that prompted the 1954 Act—which first used the term UR and let loose the floodgates. By the late 1950s most eastern cities were in the program in some way. Not so the Sunbelt. There were significant attempts to start CBD projects in many Sunbelt cities, but frequently they were frustrated in some way.
The first major Sunbelt city to start a UR project was Norfolk Virginia in 1955 (see below). By the end of the decade Atlanta, Fresno, Los Angeles, Oakland, Oklahoma City (see below), Sacramento and San Francisco had started their first projects and were in rough symmetry with their eastern counterparts (notice California cities). Between 1960 and 1965 San Antonio, Tacoma and Winston-Salem commenced projects. The vast bulk of Sunbelt cities started between 1966 and 1969: Birmingham, Denver, Little Rock, Nashville, Portland and Tucson (Abbott, 1981, pp. 164–5, Table 6.1). Abbott asserts that the median starting date “for major downtown renewal projects in southern and western cities was 1967, and almost no major land clearance projects for commercial or institutional use were started after 1970” (Abbott, 1981, p. 151).
Ron W. Coan 