Saving America's Cities

by Lizabeth Cohen

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  Table of Contents

  A Note About the Author

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  For Herrick

  And those who continue to struggle to make cities a home for all

  Introduction: Cities in Crisis

  In fall 1975, Edward J. Logue, a titan in the redevelopment of America’s ailing cities for a quarter century after World War II, found himself subjected to intense interrogation. The previous winter he had been forced to resign as president of the New York State Urban Development Corporation (UDC), the powerful state agency that he and the former liberal Republican governor Nelson Rockefeller had created in 1968 to tackle the daunting problems of economic decline and inadequate and unaffordable housing encountered by New York State’s cities. Now Logue was the star witness in the extraordinary public hearings that the state’s newly elected Democratic governor, Hugh Carey, had convened to investigate malfeasance at the UDC. On the stand, Logue was confronted with

  tough questions about the financial practices, internal operations, and reform agenda of this organization that had revolutionized urban renewal in New York State, inspired similar initiatives elsewhere in the nation, and proved the pinnacle of the veteran redeveloper Logue’s already extensive career. After he led groundbreaking urban renewal efforts in the deteriorating cities of New Haven, Connecticut, in the 1950s, and Boston, Massachusetts, in the 1960s, Logue was hailed as the savior of New York State’s troubled cities—until the UDC’s sudden downfall.

  In his defense, Logue stressed the UDC’s undeniable accomplishments. Faced with an acute housing crisis and New York voters’ repeated rejection of referenda to remedy it, the UDC had innovated a new public-private funding approach. In place of old-style urban renewal, which depended on federal funds in ever shorter supply with the rising costs of the Vietnam War, Logue and Rockefeller had developed a new paradigm for urban revitalization. They had combined over a billion dollars’ worth of bond sales to private investors, state appropriations, and still-available, if dwindling, federal dollars to build over 33,000 units of housing, mostly for moderate- and low-income New Yorkers, through 117 residential projects in 50 different communities. The UDC had also developed 69 commercial, industrial, and civic sites and established 3 substantial New Towns, a postwar planning concept that combined residences, workplaces, and cultural institutions within relatively autonomous communities. And it had generated tens of thousands of construction jobs while ensuring many more by promoting the state’s industrial development.1 Seeking to avoid pitfalls in previous urban renewal efforts, the UDC had emphasized building on undeveloped land so as not to dislocate current residents and had used its unique authority as a state-level renewal agency to enlist entire metropolitan areas in housing low-income city dwellers.

  Despite the UDC’s successes, Logue was vulnerable. Nine months earlier the UDC had run out of money and defaulted on $104.5 million in maturing short-term notes and $30 million in bank loans. With Nelson Rockefeller now serving as President Gerald Ford’s vice president, there was no one in Albany to come to the rescue.2 This calamity created a crisis in New York State that reverberated throughout the nation, shocking admirers that “the most powerful and best staffed housing delivery system ever assembled,” according to a nationally prominent planner, had actually failed. As one journalist wrote, its default was “a shot heard round both the financial world and the political world of dozens of states that had patterned their own agencies after the pioneering example set in New York.”3

  The commission appointed to investigate the UDC deliberated for a year. Logue’s personal culpability as its kingpin remained a primary focus. In the end, he was exonerated of any wrongdoing, although the UDC was faulted for lax financial oversight. But it soon became clear that the real subject of this inquiry was much bigger than Logue, and even the UDC. Rather, it was about how best to respond to a deepening crisis in American industrial cities that had been struggling economically since the Great Depression, if not before. After decades of dependence on the federal government’s tool kit and bank account, first made available under the Housing Act of 1949, Washington’s helping hand was now being withdrawn, most dramatically in 1973 when President Richard Nixon proclaimed a moratorium on all federal spending on housing.

  Logue and Rockefeller’s alternative model for funding urban renewal had endured many tests already. Tensions had grown over striking the right balance between government support and private investment; the respective authority of the mighty, state-authorized UDC, bondholders, and local communities; and how success should be measured. These conflicts were fully on display at the hearings. Logue’s adversaries charged the UDC not only with fiscal irresponsibility and mismanagement but also with refusing to meet the requirements of the private-sector bankers and bondholders, who were increasingly picking up the tab for public needs. They likewise lambasted the UDC for its “big daddy government” intrusion into the property rights of individuals and the political autonomy of localities, particularly suburban ones.4 Logue, in turn, angrily lashed out at the bankers who bought and sold UDC bonds for prioritizing their private profit and undermining the UDC’s social mission.5 As Logue confronted his accusers, he felt he was fighting to defend his personal reputation, the UDC’s record, and, most basically, what he, as a die-hard New Deal liberal, viewed as government’s fundamental responsibility to address society’s ills. That bondholders and sellers were now providing capital, he argued, should make little difference.

  In the end, these hearings exposed a deep divide between opposing conceptions of the respective roles of the public and private sectors in shaping the future of American cities. They marked the end of an era of confidence in the problem-solving capacity of government, particularly at the national level, and the dawn of a new era of more privatized solutions. Logue would continue to believe until the end of his life that “the basic responsibility for subsidizing housing for the low and lower income families is federal. It is everywhere in the developed world. Used to be with us.”6 But Logue would soon learn that the shift to solving urban problems through private-market strategies would only grow after the UDC’s demise. And his dream of finding metropolitan solutions to urban inequities would stay stillborn.

  A CAREER OF RENEWING CITIES

  Ed Logue’s lifetime of work provides an ideal lens through which to view postwar urban history, because from the early 1950s until his death, in 2000, his career tracked remarkably well with important shifts in approaches to revitalizing American cities. If Logue’s name is relatively unknown today, he was all over the mainstream press in his own day, dubbed “the Master Rebuilder” by The Washington Post in 1967, “our top city saver” by Look magazine in 1969, and “Mr. Urban Renewal” by The New York Times in 1970. Newsweek in 1972, with tongue in cheek, anointed him “one of the most impressive movers and shakers of subsidized construction since the time of King Tut.”7 Logue got his start in the field at the age of thirty-three, when New Haven’s jus
t-elected reform Democratic mayor, Richard Lee, appointed him to lead the city’s major new urban renewal effort. Like many other midsize, old industrial cities, New Haven had been declining since the 1920s, a situation only worsened by the Great Depression. Although war production had given its increasingly obsolete nineteenth-century-era industries a temporary boost, when World War II ended, the postwar future looked bleak. Moreover, increasing numbers of middle-class residents were moving into new suburban communities mushrooming outside New Haven’s borders, with businesses and retail stores following suit. Downtown New Haven, once a regional hub, was becoming noticeably passé, threatening the city’s stature—and its coffers, already diminished by having so many Yale University and county buildings off the tax rolls.

  To complicate things further, while cities like New Haven were losing middle-class, tax-paying residents to booming suburban areas of the metropolis, they were attracting new poorer populations in their place, many of them African Americans from the South seeking opportunity in the industrial North. Sadly, these hopeful migrants were arriving just as the good industrial jobs were leaving town, some for suburban locations out of their reach, others to the American South and West (and eventually offshore to the still-cheaper developing world).

  As urban leaders like Logue and Lee watched New Haven lose out in the decentralizing postwar metropolitan landscape, they undertook what they felt was a fight for their city’s survival. Skillfully grabbing hold of the recently extended lifeline of new tools and dollars provided by the federal Housing Acts of 1949 and 1954—intended to encourage urban investment as a counterweight to the national government’s generous incentives for suburban development—they managed to attract more redevelopment funds per capita to New Haven than any other American city received. Their goal was to make New Haven a national laboratory for physical urban renewal and for many of the social programs that would later undergird President Lyndon Baines Johnson’s Great Society. Indeed, their work made New Haven exactly that: a laboratory exposing both the strengths and the limitations of this first phase of federal urban renewal.

  After seven years in New Haven, a now nationally known Logue moved on to the larger New England city of Boston, lured there by another recently elected mayor to work his magic with federal stardust on this nearly bankrupt, fast-declining city. As the head of the newly strengthened Boston Redevelopment Authority (BRA), Logue implemented an ambitious plan for downtown and neighborhood renewal that sought to avoid many of the mistakes made in New Haven as well as in Boston’s first disastrous foray into urban renewal under the previous mayor—the destruction of the immigrant West End. After seven years at the helm of the BRA, Logue received credit for orchestrating the city’s turnaround into what was acclaimed as the “New Boston.” Here he learned to preserve more of the historic fabric of this centuries-old city and eventually, after several bruising failures, to negotiate somewhat better with neighborhood groups. He remained in this job until summer 1967, when he resigned to run an unsuccessful campaign for mayor.

  Soon thereafter, Governor Nelson Rockefeller recruited Logue to head his new pioneering statewide urban renewal agency, the New York State Urban Development Corporation, which Logue did with great drive and ambition—and, some would argue, hubris—until his very public downfall in 1975. Here, among other goals, he pursued the economically and socially mixed communities he had long sought and put his faith in the potential of good architecture to improve urban life, engaging leading architects to design innovative and livable subsidized housing all over New York State. The high point of his career in power and influence, the UDC era ended in a spectacular agency collapse and Logue’s humiliating, forced resignation.

  Logue’s last major job, from 1978 to 1985, brought him to the destitute South Bronx in a more modest position as the president of the nonprofit South Bronx Development Organization, loosely affiliated with New York City’s municipal government. The shrunken scale of Logue’s South Bronx stage not only resulted from his personal fate in the aftermath of the UDC debacle but also reflected the dwindling role of government—particularly at the federal level—in urban development. In the South Bronx, Logue was forced to operate within a new urban policy regime, allying closely with small-scale community development corporations (CDCs) and squeezing what he could out of the private sector and an emerging new partner on the redevelopment scene, nonprofit organizations like the Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC), which liaised between private contributors and city builders on the ground. The private-market funding model would bring with it a host of new challenges, including abandoning the cutting-edge modernist housing made possible with public funding in favor of single-family, suburban-style homes preferred by lower-middle-class buyers and private-sector mortgage lenders. Nonetheless, these modestly priced, subsidized houses for purchase and their locally committed owners would prove themselves crucial anchors for the revitalization of the South Bronx.

  URBAN RENEWAL IN HISTORY

  The decline in government’s role in subsidizing low-income housing, and solving urban problems more generally, has been accompanied by a prevailing historical treatment of urban renewal as an abject failure. Over the last half century, skeptics on the Right and the Left have advanced this critique. Conservatives have insisted that market-based solutions can be made to work, and they warn of the danger of replaying what they consider disastrous federal overreach from the 1930s through the 1960s. This position has been actively nurtured for decades by right-wing think tanks like the Manhattan Institute.8

  Progressive critics have contributed to this dominant historical narrative as well. Although they may call in the abstract for more government investment at the federal, state, and municipal levels—acknowledging that private interests cannot sufficiently fund public goods—many share the Right’s doubts about public housing and federal urban renewal. For these critics on the Left, public housing conjures up images of blocks of alienating high-rise towers. Less often do they blame years of poor maintenance for deteriorating conditions, admit the contradiction in building tall and profitably for luxury living, and acknowledge the true loss of community that public housing tenants often feel when their homes are deemed social failures and demolished. Given this broad lack of sympathy with public housing, abandoned units are rarely replaced; the country has lost a quarter million of them since the mid-1990s alone.9 Similarly, liberals often share conservatives’ dismissal of federal urban renewal as a scandalous chapter in American urban policy, misguided in concept and practice and displaying little evolution or improvement over time. Instead, they favor small-scale, neighborhood-based approaches like nonprofit CDCs over the more visible hand of government, feared as overly ambitious in scope and insensitive to community will. Although understandable, this reticence often comes at the cost of ignoring the need for citywide, to say nothing of metropolitan-wide, planning and of forgoing a larger share of the public purse.

  Condemnation of urban renewal as practiced for a quarter century after 1950 stems in no small part, I would argue, from the unquestioning acceptance of a distorted, oversimplified depiction of it as a decades-long, undifferentiated, and unmitigated disaster. This book aims to present an alternative, more nuanced history of postwar American city building that does not dismiss the federal role in renewing cities and subsidizing housing as pure folly. It claims instead that there is a usable past of successful government involvement in urban redevelopment from which we can benefit today as we grapple with the current challenges of persistent economic and racial inequality, unaffordable housing, and crumbling infrastructure. This book will contend that policies and practices of urban renewal evolved and improved over time. Although many serious mistakes were made, important lessons were also learned. And as a result of ever-shifting approaches to urban renewal, many cities were brought back to economic, cultural, and commercial vitality, with increasing amounts of community participation in the process. Urban renewal as experienced in 1972 was far different from tha
t in 1952. The small glimpse given into Logue’s UDC reveals just how experimental these urban renewal strategies often were.

  Although this book calls for a fresh reexamination of postwar urban renewal, I will in no way claim that it was always admirable in motive and effective in practice. Residents often were excessively and insensitively displaced from their homes. Flawed conceptions of the ideal city were all too common, such as when residences, work sites, and commerce were rigidly separated; when superblocks made downtown streets pedestrian-unfriendly; or when highways slashed through still viable neighborhoods. Seeking community involvement in planning was sometimes a pretense. Racial inequity proved stubbornly tenacious, even though—perhaps surprisingly—some urban renewers like Logue were deeply committed to the nation’s racial progress and at times had backing from black leaders and organizations eager for resources and infuriated with the discriminatory status quo. Urban renewal at some moments encouraged what critics cynically labeled “Negro removal” and in other moments improved lives. The UDC, for example, insisted on substantial black participation in its projects, as workers and as residents, an admirable move that surely contributed to its growing unpopularity and ultimate defeat in New York State.10

  Nor would I hold up Logue as any kind of hero. Even his admirers considered him a complicated character who could inspire with his utopian idealism of promoting the public good and could antagonize with his demanding, overly self-assured personal style. That tension was captured in a 1971 journalist’s description of Logue as “a husky, energetic man of fifty who has achieved almost mythological status in the annals of urban renewal, as hero and ogre, by tearing down and rebuilding large sectors of New Haven and Boston.”11 Moreover, as much as Logue espoused a progressive view on race, he found it easier to work with an older generation of integrationist black leaders than their more demanding successors. And although he increasingly hired women onto his staff, his liberal social agenda did not prioritize their advancement.