The seventies: the world turned upside down

 

When Cornwallis marched out of 1781 Yorktown, his band allegedly played “The World Turned Upside Down.” During the 1970s that tune should have been on top of economic development’s music chart. The 100-year-old Big City hegemony came to an abrupt end. Implosion of hegemonic Big Cities, however, was only one of four major disruptions discussed in this chapter that toppled economic development’s classical Mainstream Era. If hegemonic Big Cities and their Northern state hegemony collapsed, that meant the 50-year struggle of Big Cities to stop or control their suburban hinterland was effectively over (the Policy World, of course, never got the memo); it also meant the South and the West were on their own, and, to rub salt in hegemonic wounds, they were growing spectacularly. In the seventies, the attention focused on the South—unleashing a battle within economic development that amazingly still flares from time to time.

The profession/policy area also witnessed the hyperbolic rise of American community development, threatening, if not actually breaking, the predominance of Mainstream, Privatist, business-centered economic development. It had taken awhile, but the seventies’ American ED landscape included many varieties (wings) of community development, and during the seventies and eighties they were at their peak. Finally, cities, and the nation’s intelligentsia finally realized that our manufacturing economic base was faltering—badly. Our economy was shifting, toward service sectors, FIRE, and—the gazelle of the next 50 years—technology, in its many forms and industries, was replacing manufacturing as our growth sector and professional “target.” A several decades-long national debate, the Reindustrialization Debate (Chapter 19), had begun.

Without knowing it at the time, American economic development had entered a “Transition Period” during which it incrementally recognized, and dealt with, a series of economic, political, social, and professional dynamics/forces (including generational change and Big Sorts) that effectively displaced the old Classical Era, but were so poorly understood, and new changes so constant and disruptive, that a new order (Contemporary Economic Development) could not jell into late in the 1990s and the turn of the century.

Abrupt it may have been, but evidence of its decline can be traced to the 1920s. Reversing decline had been the chief problem Big City sub-state economic development had been tasked to solve since then. What abruptly changed was not the perception of decline, but hopes to counter it. Hope was replaced with denial, and that was replaced with despair—and blame.

Moreover, without completing sensing its importance to economic development, the definition of “growth” was changing. Politics changed its tone—and so did economic development policy and strategy. Decline was attributed to suburbanization, “the Negro Problem” and slums/ghettos. Optimism had sustained the physical urban renewal paradigm—obsolescence and blight could be fixed by public housing, slum demolition, building highways and CBD-focused urban renewal; but optimism was overwhelmed by the Great Migration, “Dark Ghettos,” white racism, riots and its obvious failure. Politically correct or not, it was perceived by many by 1970 that:

The ills of the central city in the 1960s … became almost exclusively attached to the Negro. As Nathan Glazer wrote in 1970 “Almost every problem in the United States has a racial dimension, and the racial dimension in almost every problem is a key factor. The Negro was situated at the core of physical deterioration, white flight, anemic capital investment, crime, poverty, poor schools and unemployment.” (Beauregard, 1993, p. 164)

The 1970s’ battleground was the ghetto—no longer a slum. Racial discrimination mainstream/chamber-led ED, its hopes pinned on CBD urban renewal and traditional retention and attraction strategies, had little to offer. A rejuvenated community development approach, focused on urban neighborhoods, seemed more helpful. In the section below, the various CD wings and movements of the 1970s will be described.

For those who look back and see a half-century of wage stagnation, increased inequality, and decline of the middle class, this is the decade when it started. During this decade Americans woke up to the computer and technology—they also drove Hondas and Toyotas, not Fords and Chevys. Manufacturing was clearly sick, the disease still unnamed (until 1982); but foreign manufacturers were doing well, and technology was hot. Something called the service sector, or producer services, was on the rise, and that offered some hope—although suburbs seemed to be doing better in those sectors. In sections below we will introduce the rise of technology, and the emergence of new jurisdictional economic bases saturated with service, FIRE industries, the so-called “producer services”—and outline the development of a new “Auto Alley.”

Mainstream business-focused ED moved from chambers to government and nonprofits—but the tools and strategies were still pretty much the same as before. Chambers focused, maybe specialized is a better word, more on the downtown and tourism in these years. In this decade, mainstream ED was left holding the Big City bag, dealing with plant shutdowns, workforce retraining, Band-Aid retention though loans, industrial parks, and the old perennials—targeted physical redevelopment and tax abatements—amid broken, riot-torn neighborhoods. States picked up their game, and backstopped the locals. During this decade the most promising cutting-edge strategies came from business itself: corporate strategy, business management, teambuilding, Sigma Six. Productivity and process, retooling lean and mean, and all that good stuff. That should put a stop to Japanese imperialism.