BIG SORT: CHANGE IN POLICY SYSTEMS AND POLITICAL CULTURE
Our history lectures sternly that economic developers should take population mobility seriously. No one is arguing one should ignore the other two drivers, or that other forces not formally included in our model can affect ED, but population migration has been fundamental and a constant in our history. There have been periods when it seems economic developers have done little else than cope with the effects of population movement. Growth is consistently defined in terms of population increase and vice versa. One could make a strong case that non-economic developers’ chief measure of ED success or failure is population change. In ED the Census Bureau is far more important than the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
When most think of population mobility they think of the West—deservedly so. One has to be from another planet not to recognize the impact of settling a mostly unsettled land. But western population growth had to come from somewhere. Past population mobility established the northern hegemony as a monopolistic nineteenth-century immigration, and froze the South into a region impervious to time and change. The Southern Diaspora/Great Migration was a driving factor in northern suburbanization and decline of the monocentric metropolitan landscape. The Great Migration changed the nature and political culture of Big Cities—and fueled the rise of new CD wings. Population mobility played a large role in the seventies’ implosion of Big Cities. And the depopulation of the South too had its effects on southern economic development—as did post WWII repopulation as well.
As we lay the foundations for our twenty-first-century CED, it stands to reason that population mobility can exert its impact on economic development as did deindustrialization and reindustrialization. We will argue here that not only immigration but also a culture-infused generational cohort change has fundamentally reshaped our sub-state jurisdictional (and metropolitan) political cultures and policy systems in ways that contributed to the politicization of economic development, but has also paralyzed many jurisdictional policy systems from coming to grips with the reality of economic decline—encouraging them instead to follow ideological dreams. After 1970 generational cohort change substantially challenged the old definitions of “good” growth and offered an alternative definition of “good” ED. That redefinition prompted a true revolution, certainly a schism and fault line with American economic development.
“Good ED growth” is more complicated than the old “bad growth,” and that complication has fundamentally redefined economic development. There is one small problem with this redefined growth—not everybody, certainly not every state, has jumped on board. To redefine or not to redefine growth has been a major wedge within twenty-first-century economic development. Blue States have their Silicon Valley and Red States have Houston. It not only creates a Red and Blue State dichotomy, but it also reaches into the metro politics of most of our metropolitan areas. What became evident by the end of the (twentieth) century was that geographical ED variation resulted not only from the flow (volume) of people moving, but also from where they moved and the consequences that followed. We “sorted” ourselves out, clustering in communities perceived as similar to ourselves, and reinforcing policy systems and cementing into place ED/CD policy, goals, processes and strategies.
In this chapter, we discuss three types of population mobility, leaving aside “frictional” mobility within metropolitan areas: immigration, southern regional change and generation cohort change. We shall briefly discuss each. Before we do, however, we will introduce the “Big Sort,” which characterized much of the post-1970 population movements and which facilitated the increasing polarization and politicization of American economic development.
The Big Sort
ED/CD is a policy area whose policies/strategies/programs are produced by a policy system. The Big Sort is less about what created the types of policy systems in vogue during any particular period than how they came to be distributed across regions, states and metro areas. Big Sort population mobility is only one factor, an important one after 1970, but still only one factor. Because of the Big Sort our two cultural ships could dock in jurisdictions (and neighborhoods) within each metro area. Post-suburban jurisdictional demographic homogeneity, however, could easily result in metropolitan heterogeneity. This testimony to local democracy is also a prescription for polarization. Yet one more force has injected politicization and polarization into ED/CD policymaking. What is this Big Sort? Why is all this stuff happening?
Bishop’s (2008) The Big Sort provides a helpful backdrop to the reader—and a neat icon-like expression that guides our analysis of the interplay between political culture, population mobility, and policy system/policy output change. A few observations and caveats concerning the Big Sort are advisable. The book is focused on politics/voting behavior which can be helpful to us, but for the most part is not a primary objective of the history. More limiting is its close association with Richard Florida’s (2002) The Rise of the Creative Class and knowledge-based economics. A great deal of Bishop relies on the application and legitimation of Florida’s Creative Class. This history finds that linkage limits our analysis greatly—and for the most part we do not rely on the association of creative class migration with the Big Sort. To the extent that it has utility for the history, it comes from its overlap with our generational cohort concept.
Secondly, as might be evident from our past chapters, population migration inherently involves some level of “sorting”—it is not limited to post-1965 Big Sort. Also, as “Go West Young Man” implies, population migration has been historically associated with young, new households, and frequently men—with women and families more in a second wave. This has been captured by our generation cohort concept. The rising Sunbelt has caught a great deal of this generational mobility—to the extent that post-1970 generational cohorts have been integrated by many commentators into the redefinition of “western” economic growth, and the refocus of ED attention to the neighborhood. One reason we inject Del Webb’s Sun City is to alert the reader that one characteristic of post-1965 population mobility is that older generations can be an important element in our “Big Sort” and that intra-county migration by all age cohorts can play a meaningful role in our ED history.
Bishop asserted in the Big Sort that he discovered created “inequality” (which he never defined, or even indexed). He posited that “the Big Sort was creating greater inequality among cities—in patents, incomes, and levels of education 4—we wondered whether there was a relationship between culture and economic success”. Using Putnam’s “Making Democracy Work” civic culture, he concluded there was a negative relationship between the health of the local civic culture and the well-being of the economy. The tighter the social ties, the fewer the patents, the lower the wages, and the slower the rates of growth.
Using another Putnam database, the DDB Needham Life Style Survey, he found that the civic culture of high-tech cities was the reverse of low-tech cities. He believed this represented a post-materialist culture (Bishop, 2008, pp. 141–4). The difference between the two was the prevalence of Generation Xers (possessing the past-materialist culture). “Educated young people in the ‘creative class’ would flock to places where they would not be bound by old ideas or tight social ties” (Bishop, 2008, p. 144). While we may agree, I have no idea whether old ideas/tight social ties or the existence of jobs by rising sector gazelles—or any other confluence of multiple factors—prompted the migration, or that the ultimate destination was “chicken or egg.” Did creatives flock to a city whose culture appealed to them, or did that destination change as the flock of creatives landed? That the cultural values and proclivities of a young generation traveled with them as they escaped their parents and/or pursued economic opportunity, is, for me, an open question fifteen years later.
Bishop joined Gen Xer’s “culture” and migration to Romer and Solow’s knowledgebased innovation. Arguing that Solow’s third driver of economic productivity (the first two being the traditional land and capital), technical knowledge with Romer’s finding that cities grew according to their ability to arrange the three factors to “innovate” successfully. Having physical capital (a harbor) and capital was not sufficient; a city had to creatively create more value through ideas and processes (innovation) that produced growth. Cities made ideas and incremental innovation possible. The culture of a city either facilitated this innovation or it didn’t. Joel Mokyr’s A Culture of Growth presents a more sophisticated version of culture’s interplay with innovation, but with humility is willing to admit that: “We actually know remarkably little about the kind of institutions that foster and stimulate technological progress … and intellectual innovation” (Mokyr, 2016, p. 6).
The process for innovation was, Bishop asserted, at heart a social process, best advanced through face-to-face contact and sharing. The lack of social ties and weakness of old ideas facilitated this innovation process. What distinguished growing cities from declining cities was “their lifestyle” that derived from their culture—Gen Xers moved to cities for their lifestyle. These cities were Edward Glaeser’s “consumer cities” (Glaeser and Gottlieb, 2006) and Florida’s “creative cities” (Florida, 2005). And Clark’s “entertainment cities” (Clark, 2004).
The way Americans sorted themselves created a new kind of cultural separation. People living in different cities literally had different ways of relating to family, to government, to strangers, and to religion. This gave people choice. There were places they could enjoy the comfort of strong families, bustling civic groups, near universal political participation, and abundant volunteering. And there were cities that offered anonymity, the opportunity for self-invention, and the economic benefits [innovation] of loose ties (Bishop, 2008, p. 153).
Over three decades people separated themselves by education, income, race, and way of life. The best educated abandoned old manufacturing cities … and rural communities … and moved to high-tech cities. Finally, people segregated by the way they wanted to live … willing to pay a premium for the lifestyle found there … Prospects for prosperity deviated wildly, as innovation sprang from some cities, but not others. And all this migration created political imbalances that grew more pronounced by the year. (Bishop, p. 155)
While this history may not fully embrace Bishop’s linkage of Big Sort culture and innovation/knowledge-based economics, we are more on board when he argues that since 1965 or so, we have incrementally evolved into a “post-materialism culture.” Borrowing from Inglehart’s provocative research in The Silent Revolution (1977; and Inglehardt and Welzel, 2005), we left post-WWII moderation—characterized by a bipartisan consensus, public civility and non-ideological, expert-driven decisionmaking—for the current cultural mind frame. Inglehardt borrowed heavily from Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, and held that the booming post-WWII economic growth created a worldview (augmented by each successive generation) that increasingly replaced the previous, longstanding worldview.
With few aware of it, and with nobody’s permission, a new kind of politics gradually formed after 1965. The new society was more about personal taste than attachment to any specific public policy. It was more concerned with self-expression, aspirations and personal belief than with social-economic class issues (Bishop, 2008, pp. 103–4). People who knew their basic needs were satisfied could adopt different values from those who lived with scarcity. Slow growth, environmentalism, and eventually climate change could intrude into older definitions of economic growth that stressed “conquering or subduing nature” as essential to progress. Affluence permitted a new generation to climb up the Maslowian hierarchy of needs.
Some individuals or groups, of course, did not adopt the new culture and instead sought to retain the post-WWII traditional culture either as a defense against worsening economic tides or as some measure of stability, continuity and meaning in a rapidly changing world. For Bishop, religious orientation was especially important in this bipolar cultural evolution.5 Woodard asserted that the cultural values and traditions of the Eleven Nations played a role as well (Woodard, 2011). This geographic cultural Big Sort is the inherent driver of our politicization and polarization. How did this occur in our jurisdictions?
Bishop explained that migrants choose one jurisdiction over another, creating a “political segregation of American communities.” Borrowing from James Gimpel’s studies and Patchwork Nation (Gimpel and Schuknecht, 2004), Bishop found that “most of America and most Americans were engaged in a 30-year movement toward more homogeneous ways of living” (2008, p. 11); both political segregation and polarization resulted. Facilitated by the car and discretionary income that freed households from “want and worry” allowed them the opportunity “to reorder their lives around their values, their tastes and their beliefs. They were clustering in communities of like-mindedness” (Bishop 2008, p. 12). Mobile people selected neighborhoods and cities whose lifestyle and values reflected their own. Obviously, the household locational decision involves many factors. Certainly, price is one of them: “likemindedness” is another. Big Sort population mobility produced concentrated power bases for the two political parties—and distinctive policy systems.
Lacking the understanding and ties [issues, patterns and traditions that characterize a jurisdiction] … new residents will import and then act upon their own partisan affiliation and viewpoints. If a volume of migration is high enough, a place’s political distinctiveness can be washed away rather quickly as the native population is overwhelmed … by newcomers. (Gimpel and Schuknecht, 2004, p. 382)
Not all of Woodard’s eleven American cultures completely adopted the more secular, more Progressivist worldview. Some adopted only parts, or injected different meanings and definitions. Some nations change more deliberately than others. The various old political cultures that floated our two ships thus far through this history in one way or another became a part of this Big Sort polarization. The post-1970 Big Sort population mobility “docked” migrants into demographically unsinkable communities and jurisdictions
Immigration
The 800-lb population mobility gorilla is, of course, the massive post-1990 immigration inflow. The nation’s foreign-born population (9.7 million in 1970) quadrupled to exceed 40 million by 2010. In absolute numbers foreign-born in 2010 were the highest ever in our nation’s history. In 1910 14.7 percent of the nation was foreign-born; in 2010 it was 12.9 percent. California, New York, Florida and New Jersey led by absolute number and immigrant share of the total population. Texas was 3rd in number, 7th in population share. More than 27 percent of California’s 2010 population was foreignborn. Unlike nineteenth-/early twentieth-century immigration, every state attracted immigrant populations. Sizeable numbers of immigrants poured into the suburbs as well as central cities (Singer et al., 2008; Baxandall and Ewen, 2010). Hispanics captured the media headlines, but Asians also participated in large numbers.
During the 1970s net immigration—legal and illegal—was estimated at more than 7 million (Massey, 1981). The Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) apprehended more than 1.2 million illegal immigrants and estimated 4 million eluded capture. Immigration during its early years in the 1970s and 1980s hit Miami, Los Angeles, New York City, and Honolulu (14 percent) the hardest. Miami’s foreign-born population was 54 percent in 1980, Los Angeles 27 percent and New York City 24 percent, Chicago and Boston about 15 percent, as was San Diego, Houston and San Antonio about 8 percent, Tampa 7 percent and Dallas, Phoenix, Albuquerque between 5 and 7 percent. Atlanta was only 2 percent (Mohl, 1993, pp. 149–50). It is important to understand not only who and how, but when, immigration struck the nation’s cities and metro areas. Immigration after 1990 was more intense, for example, than before; hindsight and broad stroke analysis can, unintentionally, result in distortion.
Immigration on this scale is a shock to jurisdictional policy systems in any number of policy areas. Until the Great Recession times were “good” and the economy’s capacity to “absorb” immigrants, mostly into low-wage employment, seemed remarkable. It is a testimony to the immigrants themselves that they were able to make it and raise families during these years. Economic developers focused more on highly talented, well-educated immigrants prized for their creativity, advanced degrees and hard work, as well as risk-taking entrepreneurs. This fit in well with high-tech/biohealth/information cluster-targeting common to the 1990s and after.
Immigration changed neighborhoods, created homogeneous ethnic suburbs and augmented high-end and low-wage labor forces. Regarding political cultures, Hispanic el Norte has already changed the cultural face of America. Hispanics are the largest “minority”; they elect representatives to all levels of government and have diffused and settled in concentrated areas. They are one of Woodard’s Eleven Nations. The already evidenced shock on California politics/ED by Mexican Hispanics and Asians may or may not auger what lies ahead for Texas.
New South: The Vanishing Sunbelt
During these years one heard more and more about “the New South.” The initial announcement was delivered in a 1976 Saturday Review, which hinted the South was “the New America.”6 In 2005 an AP-Ipsos Survey reported that more than one-third of those living in the South did not identify themselves as “southerners.” This might be because the South grew by 20 percent between 1980 and 1990, and another 17 percent the following decade. By 2000 the South held 35.6 percent of the nation’s population; by 2015 it was 37.7—more Americans lived in the South than in any other region. Not surprisingly, a literature has developed concerning southern identity (i.e. political culture).7
A part of the reason for the rise of the New South was a “reverse Great Migration” which supposedly started: “Between 1965 and 1970, the South lost about 280,000 African-American residents. Just a decade later, between 1975 and 1980, it [the South] gained more than 100,000, a trend that has only picked up steam since.”8 Between 2005 and 2010 a net average of 66,000 African-Americans resettled in the South each year (Cobb, 2005). College grads and retirees constitute a major portion of the reverse migration. New South migration was very uneven: Atlanta, Texas, Virginia, North Carolina, plus Florida captured the lion’s share—leaving the Old South largely untouched. The New South—the Research Triangle, auto alley, the Florida–North Carolina retirement magnet, Orlando’s Magic Kingdom, Atlanta its capital, Charlotte the financial center, and Texas its cutting edge—had finally penetrated northern and midwestern consciousness. Economic vibrancy was one thing, internal identity another—and whether the latter would allow a sustained resurgence was the question.
The Sunbelt ballyhoo of the late 1970s suggested that the realization of Henry Grady’s dreams might at last be close at hand. Like Grady’s New South, however, the Sunbelt South retained its ties to a past characterized not only by bright hopes but by recurrent disappointments. Thus, it remained to be seen whether the region could actually reach the nation’s economic mainstream in the 1980s and in so doing, make prosperity a permanent feature of a new “southern” way of life. (Cobb, 1993a, p. 208)
Cobb argues that the New South’s rise was based on a particular ED strategy: state business climate. State/municipal strengths had long been associated with recruitment, marketing, promotion and attraction programs. But the business climate strategy rests ultimately on one added ingredient: a perceived reality independent of marketing and advertising. Businesses didn’t need to be told or marketed; they could figure out for themselves the business climate and make their own judgments. In the New South, businesses no longer needed to be recruited. As the years rolled on, the South won more and more of these normal business decisions.
Cobb makes the case, and we agree, that Florida was the South in microcosm—and its leading edge. Florida captured many of the New South’s characteristics and led the region in capturing jobs and people. Florida had natural advantages of beaches and weather (?); it survived the civil rights era with a reputation of being “only moderately racist,” with “respectable conservative politics,” access to an abundant low-cost workforce and an easy place to attract workers and firms. As to establish its bona fides in business climate, Florida was literally the first state to enact right to work laws, in 1943 (and again legally in 1947).
Florida and Cape Canaveral launched the first space flight, the Mercury Project in 1961. What is less known is that the Cape launched its first rocket in 1950, and in 1959 the first successful launching of an ICBM. Since the 1960s Florida had lured northern residents seeking a warm retirement, carrying with them their social security and pensions. Ever more tourism followed; so did Disney World, which opened in 1971. As Florida gathered steam, residents, jobs, pensions and tourist dollars, it almost singlehandedly created the favorable growth statistics in the early 1970s for the entire southern region. Florida personified the non-manufacturing, service and government sector character of the New South. Also, worth comment is its tourism strategy, which became Florida’s top industry sector after World War II.
Other southern states did not enjoy such obvious natural advantages, plus they suffered from more difficult civil rights and historical stereotypes. But the seventies’ success changed the perception of the South by many outsiders. Watergate was a plus for the South’s image. The “good old boy” Sam Ervin, and also Howard Baker, performed well and responsibly; George Wallace and Lester Maddox had given way to Jimmy Carter, Fred Thompson (of Law and Order fame) and Reuben Askew. Country music was in; so were The Waltons and The Dukes of Hazzard—and Larry Hagman’s Dallas began in 1978. Equally important, the North (shall we say the Union) was at its lowest ebb. Big Cities were “hitting bottom,” fiscal basket cases wracked by bussing riots and northern white backlash.
South Carolina’s resurgence in this period is especially interesting. The South’s now almost two-decade old promotional and attraction campaigns bore unexpected fruit; the South overall was garnering 50 percent of all FDI. By 1972’s end, foreign firms had invested more than $5 billion in the South, and within two years that number had risen to $8 billion. By 1978 several southern states were attracting as much as $1 billion annually, with South Carolina, North Carolina and Virginia leading the way in numbers of plants, and petroleum-rich Louisiana ahead in terms of aggregate value of foreign investments. Cobb reports the British, West Germans and Japanese were particularly aggressive, the former building 57 plants ($1.25 billion), half of which were in the Carolinas. South Carolina captured way more than its fair share of all this foreign investment—in fact by the end of the seventies 40 percent of South Carolina’s annual business investment came from foreign firms. There was more West German investment in South Carolina than in any other location in the world (Cobb, 1993a, pp. 188–93).
In South Carolina’s case the active public–private partnership of the State, its EDO and local communities combined with “the same red carpet, kid-glove treatment afforded all industrial prospects by southern states” seemed particularly effective. Spartanburg South Carolina (population at the time about 50,000), the beneficiary of a local developer’s campaign to recruit foreign industry, lured one $200 million West German textile plant which in a few years became the fourth largest polyester plant in the nation. By the mid 1970s Spartanburg had landed 24 foreign firms (4000 employees). Population and tax base increases resulting from these investments were dramatic (Cobb, 1993a, p. 192).
As to why the South benefited so much from FDI a number of reasons can be cited. Rather than fight quotas and import restrictions, developing on-site capacity seemed reasonable—especially when low cost, right to work, southern labor could be employed. The business climate strategy mentioned earlier also was impactful in foreign decision-making. While states across the nation were regulating the effects of pollution, the South conducted a widespread deregulation of pollution (Cobb, 1993a, pp. 229–53). The impact of FDI did not go unnoticed in the North. In 1976 the New York Times issued a six-article series on the South and its glowing economic success, population gains and life-style advantages.9 The reason, however, it cited for all this southern prosperity was not FDI or Florida or southern business climate, but federal government spending.
The seventies witnessed a dramatic reversal in the perception and, to some degree the reality, of the southern economy and way of life. The New South lay alongside some redefined and reshaped version of the Old South. But by the end of the century an earlier observation by Goldfield and Rabinowitz (1993) seemed valid: the Sunbelt was no longer a useful term to describe the variated regions. Not only was the West in a different “space” than the South, but the Southwest also did very nicely on its own. Still largely undiscovered are “the Mountain States” and Alaska and Hawaii.
Generational Cohort Migrations
Generational cohort migration has permeated our discussion thus far and so it may seem confusing why this section concentrates on that topic. What follows are two sub-topics that flesh out the character of post-1965 generational migrations. The first (Retirement) injects the old farts, without whom Florida and much of the Southwest would look quite different. That older folk move in numbers is the departure from previous migration patterns. That cities are built with old folks in mind is something “new under the sun.” It surely adds a new dimension to ED people and tourist attraction. Sadly, we admit our failure to include “entertainment” as a third form of migration. That will be picked up in detail (Disneyland et al.) in the next volume.
The second topic (Boomers) is the more traditional, focusing on younger folk moving about and being environmental and creative. In that sub-section, we introduce the concept of “redefinition of growth” that accompanied the boomer migration. To flesh that out we end this topic in a final sub-section (Western Neighborhoods and Slow Growth) with three brief examples (Seattle, Portland, San Diego) of how generational migration and redefinition of growth changed politics/ED and formed new policy systems.
Retirement migration
A little-mentioned, hidden-in-plain-sight population movement with lots of implications for ED is retirement migration—a generational cohort migration. Yes, Florida and Arizona captured more than their fair share of this; indeed, one retirement community (Villages FL) in 2014 was the fastest-growing census area in the US. Retirement migration had a heart attack after the Great Recession, but during the period discussed in this chapter (1970–2000) robust rates of migration affected places like Myrtle Beach SC, Austin TX and Sunbelt locations like Las Vegas. Left in its wake was smaller cities in the industrial Midwest and Mid-Atlantic. New retirement communities (a post-suburbia development) sprang up throughout the Sunbelt, epitomized by the proverbial Del Webb community—which started in the 1950s.
Retirement destinations and the community left behind are obviously the most affected. Having said all this, however, most pre-2000 retirement-age households (90 percent) did not relocate. They were the most stable population group in America— only 9 percent (about 4.5 million) changed communities during these years. Among the states with the most in-migrants aged 60+ were New Hampshire and Idaho. Older Americans change communities; but they change houses more frequently (25 percent), and that means neighborhoods in both central cities and post-suburbia feel the effects of retirement migration. School districts beware; assisted living centers take note!
Boomers and progeny: it depends on what growth is
Of recent years, generational cohort mobility has focused on Generation X and Richard Florida’s Rise of the Creative Class (2002); but before they came along there were the boomers. In the seventies/eighties the baby-boomers in their early/middle twenties (1970s) exacted a huge impact on economic development—they did it by redefining growth. Growth, as noted previously, was heretofore the core of what American economic and community development was about. Questions concerning growth’s definition, however, assumed a great importance during the 1950s when poverty (inequality) was rediscovered. The rise of community development also redefined growth by urging inclusion of groups left out of it. CD as a strategy of income redistribution and identity politics was an ED response, largely affecting low-income distressed neighborhoods in Big Cities and the rising Sunbelt. The entry into society (and economy) of the baby-boom generation in the seventies, however, produced a serious assault on growth’s definition.
In particular, boomers who moved into the Sunbelt pressured the establishment to change growth’s definition to fit their environmentalist/quality of life concerns—and, in some locations, advanced issues today associated with “identity” (race/ethnicity, feminism and sexual) The first redefined the “what” of growth, the latter the “who.” Neighborhood level was home base. On the fringes of Sunbelt cities/suburbs, boomers challenged the dominant business/CBD growth nexus—Abbott’s “Neo-Progressives” as discussed in Chapter 15. This is when “anti” or “slow” growth first appeared—when “growth management” became a byword. Boomers held new ideas about cities and communities found in books by authors such as Jane Jacobs (The Death and Life of Great American Cities, 1961), Rachel Carson (Silent Spring, 1962) and Michael Harrington (The Other America, 1962). They also learned the art of political mobilization from protests and anti-war movements.
Young boomers entered the post-industrial workforce as professionals, professors/ teachers, government and nonprofit workers, entrepreneurs and corporate managers (Rowe, 2001). Harvey Molotch describes them as “cosmopolitan in outlook, pecuniary in interest”: they viewed cities and neighborhoods “more as residential environments than as economic machines.” Abbott labels these folk as “quality of life liberals” who worried that” breakneck development was fouling the air, eating up open space, sacrificing neighborhoods … and deferring costs of [pollution] to future decades” (quoted in Abbott, 2008, p. 205). Among other aspects, they were considerably less inclined to support economic growth to catch up with the city down the road (urban competitive hierarchy).
They also expected more from business than jobs and taxes. Spared the misery of the Depression and the horrors and loneliness of war, they expected more out of life—quality of life liberals followed an existentialism not associated with their parents or Abbott’s neo-progressive business elites. While eastern cities coped with fiscal distress and racial change, Sunbelt cities were coping with growth. Women became engaged in political life, facilitated by grass-roots neighborhood-level politics that tapped into traditional concerns of family, school and home. Western neighborhoodlevel and citywide alliances proved a training ground for women soon to be elected mayors of western cities. Oklahoma City elected Patience Latting in 1971, and over the next 20 years, women mayors were elected in Dallas, Fort Worth, Austin, Houston, Galveston, San Antonio, Corpus Christi, El Paso, Phoenix, Santa Barbara, San Jose, San Francisco, Modesto, Stockton and Spokane. By 1987, women were mayors in 26 western and southwestern cities whose population exceeded 50,000—half of the nation’s total of women mayors in that year (Abbott, 2008).
New ED/CD strategies were associated with this cultural change (new urbanism, smart growth) and tools (growth management)—try using eminent domain after 1980. NIMBY, BANANA10 and a host of other complimentary euphemisms came from these folks. So did the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), the State Environmental Quality Review Act/SEQR(A) and a host of other federal and state regulations that reshaped ED redevelopment and created a new strategy—brownfields. Even tourism was attacked as the “Devil’s Bargains” (Rothman, 1998). On the other hand, many young native-born westerners wanted to limit exploitation of the environment by extractive corporations, and were incensed with the paternalism and insensitivity of federal bureaucracies to local economic use of federal land. For them the federal government was increasingly viewed as a colonial power, its land management practices arbitrarily limiting growth and land use by fiat. This blossomed into a “Sagebrush Rebellion”—a rebellion which at its roots questions who controls western local economic development (Cawley, 1993).
Examples of our generational cohort policy shift appear by the 1970s, coming in several forms. In 1976 Denverites contested the city’s involvement in the Olympics— which was supported by the entire panoply of the city’s political and ED establishment. Earlier (in 1972), future Senator Patricia Schroeder and Governor Richard Lamm, leaders of the opposition, had raised 77,000 signatures for state and city constitutional amendments prohibiting public funds for purposes “that would only benefit tourism, business and real estate.” The Privatist Sagebrush Rebellion exploded in 1979 when the Nevada legislature demanded 49 million acres of federal land (86 percent of Nevada’s total land area) be transferred to the state.
Western Neighborhoods and Slow Growth
Sunbelt city boomers involved themselves in neighborhood issues and affairs. Ethnic, racial and sexual identity groups settled in concentrations in selected neighborhoods—an early Big Sort. A catalyst for their involvement was highway-related eminent domain. Moreover, single-minded pursuit of a CBD-infrastructure strategy easily was perceived as disinvestment of neighborhoods. Working- and middle-class neighborhood associations formed to protect themselves and assert demands for their fair share. In Sunbelt city after city, a neighborhood versus CBD/annexed periphery dynamic inserted itself into elections and policy demands. Tucson provides an excellent example of the role neighborhoods played in policymaking, and Albuquerque anti-CBD UR was hotly contested as well. Pacific Coast large cities (San Diego, Seattle and Portland especially) were distinctive as their overall policy system tilted toward neighborhoods as primary players.
Seattle’s neighborhood movement appeared alongside its version of UR (the Space Needle and the 1962 World’s Fair): “a perfect example of urban boosterism designed to stimulate economic growth, and to symbolize the modernity of Seattle”. Seattle’s 1957 plan listed 100 neighborhood units, but focused on freeways, CBD and high-density development. As these delights unfolded during the sixties, neighborhood opposition mounted—a 1968 bond issue required at least 20 percent of its proceeds be spent on critical neighborhood needs. The War on Poverty/Model City neighborhood associations participated in the bond campaign, and that success was followed by a “wave of grassroots activity” for neighborhood preservation. The wave stopped freeway expansion, saved the historic CBD Pike Place Market and acquired significant representation on the new planning initiative—“Goals for Seattle 2000” (1972–73). Between 1967 and 1971, a city council responsive to neighborhoods was elected. The council set up EDOs to encourage neighborhood participation in ED and planning decisions. In 1970 newly elected Mayor Wes Uhlman established nine mini-city halls, created an Office of Neighborhood Planning and (1971) started 28 neighborhood improvement plans. Included in these plans were requirements incorporating the state’s recently approved environmental review and impact law (Abbott, 2008).
Portland in 1972 (and 1976) elected a young mayor, Neil Goldschmidt. His charisma set the tone for city politics for the next decade—centering on neighborhood planning/ preservation, each neighborhood possessing a citizen-governed EDO intended to keep the “neighborhood livable.” Freeways were blocked and stopped, and major UR-style redevelopment projects put on the shelves. Increases in housing and citizen participation in decision-making were institutionalized—the Portland Development Commission was reoriented to CBD historic preservation and housing. An Office of Neighborhood Associations was established to liaise with organized groups of citizens seeking neighborhood livability so they could impact zoning, planning, budgeting decisions of the city. Initially (1974), it included 30 neighborhood groups in its work plans (Abbott, 2008). By the end of the 1970s Portland’s famous “urban growth boundary,” enforced by a regional “metro,” government was in place.
San Diego’s Pete Wilson, elected mayor in 1971, feared his city would be a “Smogsville,” so he overturned the city’s previous development motto, “City in Motion,” and replaced it with “America’s Finest City”—stressing neighborhoods and quality of life instead. Wilson aggressively implemented his “managed growth” program to restrain sprawl and promote revitalization of city neighborhoods. Charleston SC also initiated a strong neighborhood planning, citizen participation and historic preservation program—demonstrating Sunbelt neighborhood initiatives stretched from sea to shining sea. In San Antonio, Hispanic-led neighborhood CDOs effectively redirected neo-progressive CBD, highways and infrastructure strategies into powerful neighborhood infrastructure and community/education services.
This was the age when neighborhoods became effective units of economic development policy-making. As such, neighborhoods provided a vehicle for expressing the shifting trends in a community’s political culture; they also reinforced the growing trend toward the Big Sort. The most radical use of neighborhoods in this era, however, was to bring about municipal policy system change—which, if successful, could easily change the character and direction of municipal ED/CD strategies.
Ron W. Coan 