Saving America's Cities
Page 2
At times Logue was a figure of Greek tragedy, whose good intentions were undermined by his own fatal flaws. One blind spot in particular he shared with other urban liberals of his era. Eager to achieve greater social and economic opportunity in American democratic society, he became deeply invested in an expert-driven activist government. So convinced was he of the righteousness of his goals and his own ability to deliver them, however, that he sometimes paid mere lip service to community input, sanctioning a less-than-democratic process that marginalized and alienated the very people whose lives he had set out to improve.12 Indeed, Logue struggled with what it meant to live up to his signature slogan of “planning with people” throughout his career. In New Haven and into the Boston years, he embraced what I call pluralist democracy, content to give voice mostly to representatives of established community interests. Later in Boston, and much more so in the South Bronx, he would learn the limits of that approach and come to accept the importance of embracing a more grassroots participatory democracy. One could even argue that it was in Logue’s bootstrapped South Bronx project, devoid of much government support and by necessity allied closely with neighborhood-based CDCs, where he came closest to actually planning with people.
A MULTIDIMENSIONAL STORY
I was drawn to a biographical approach to urban history, after many years of writing the social and political history of large groups of ordinary Americans, for the opportunity to investigate the experience of a person in a position of power during the postwar era. My career probing what has been called “history from the bottom up” left me eager to examine “history from the top down,” but to bring to it social history’s attentiveness to class, gender, race and ethnicity, profession, and other forms of identity that shaped how influential protagonists thought and acted. That Ed Logue was city-bred as a lower-middle-class Catholic in Philadelphia; that as a scholarship student he attended elite Yale College and Law School, where he became a progressive labor organizer, a civil rights activist, and an opponent of what would become known as McCarthyism; that he served as a bombardier in World War II with a bird’s-eye view of European cities; that he brought an assertive, sometimes overly dismissive, hyper-male style to his redevelopment work—all these matter greatly in this story. Moreover, because Logue played a formative role in creating a new kind of postwar professional—the urban-redevelopment expert—who carried an expanding body of skills and knowledge from city to city, his personal experience illuminates a wider world. As Logue joked at a reunion celebrating his first mayoral boss, Richard Lee of New Haven, “Look at all of us. We have rebuilt half the East Coast.”13
Too often the era of urban renewal is depicted as an abstract contest between unstoppable urban-growth machines and the defenseless communities that became their victims.14 Following the career of someone like Logue allows us to grapple with the agency, motives, and constraints on all sides and, most importantly, to understand when and how conflicts or negotiations took place. The actions and attitudes of urban specialists on the one hand, and residents—mobilized and not—on the other, cannot easily be separated; they constantly interacted and shaped each other.
Although this book tells primarily an American postwar story, it will make many connections to the international context. The ambition to undertake the urban renewal of U.S. cities coincided with the rebuilding of many cities worldwide after the ravages of the Great Depression and the devastations of World War II. A young Logue found inspiring models in both the social housing experiments of European reformers dating back to the 1920s and the modernization schemes and community development programs he observed in the emerging new nation of India in the early 1950s, where he worked in the American embassy before he returned to New Haven. A more mature Logue became captivated by postwar European New Towns and imported the concept to New York State in the 1970s. Although every country put its own stamp on how it implemented innovations in architecture and planning, it is striking how widely ideas circulated among practitioners increasingly operating in globalizing professions.
The lack of subtlety that I have lamented in current historical understanding of postwar American urbanism stems partly from its frequent framing as a monumental battle between the clashing visions of the villainous Robert Moses and the saintly Jane Jacobs. Moses is frequently depicted as epitomizing government arrogance and the prioritizing of planners’ projects over people. And Jacobs, in turn, is hailed for slamming planners’ intrusions as disrupting the natural evolution of the street and neighborhood. This dichotomy is too simplistic and makes these two twentieth-century giants of urbanism into symbols of rigid orthodoxies. In truth, they were both more complex figures. Moses did not only bulldoze neighborhoods and build insensitively; he constructed crucially needed urban infrastructure.15 In her influential 1961 critique of big planning, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jacobs taught the world important lessons in valuing the spontaneous life of the street, in allowing city neighborhoods to develop organically, and in viewing planners—with their top-down expertise—skeptically. But her sweeping repudiation of the planning profession and government intervention left few tools in place for delivering more equitable housing for those requiring it or for constructing badly needed public works.16 No surprise that conservatives, particularly libertarians, have embraced Jacobs alongside her more left-leaning admirers, finding her criticism of urban renewal consistent with their own defense of individual property rights and discomfort with the “federal bulldozer” and other government actions deemed excessive. In fact, the conservative ideologue William F. Buckley, Jr., included Jacobs in his anthology American Conservative Thought in the Twentieth Century, while the libertarian magazine Reason, devoted to “free minds and free markets,” named Jacobs one of its “thirty-five heroes of freedom.”17
Logue knew Moses slightly. Both Yale men and avid football fans, they met up regularly in the parking lots of the Yale Bowl or Princeton’s Palmer Stadium. While admiring some of Moses’s accomplishments—parks and parkways, not public housing—Logue sought repeatedly to differentiate himself as less imperious and more committed to social change. As a close colleague at the UDC put it, Logue “was Robert Moses and the anti–Robert Moses all at once. He would think as large as Moses and had no less ability to implement … But unlike Moses, he was as committed to social transformation as he was to physical building.”18 Moses in turn was suspicious enough of Logue that when he heard reports that Mayor John V. Lindsay was trying to recruit him to New York City “as a super duper planner,” Moses wrote to a Boston acquaintance—perhaps in jealousy, his own power already much diminished—to express his doubts and inquire how Logue was faring there. His correspondent gave him no satisfaction when he replied, “I think that Ed Logue has done a splendid job in Boston.”19 Comparisons between Logue and Moses continued long after their deaths. In 2008, the esteemed architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable expressed her frustration with the slow rebuilding of the World Trade Center in a Wall Street Journal column, “New York’s 9/11 Site Needed Not a Moses but a Logue.”20
Logue dueled spiritedly and sometimes meanly with Jacobs. He rejected her stance, which he characterized sarcastically as “no more federal renewal aids; let the cities fend for themselves,” an “approach [that] has won her many new friends, particularly among comfortable suburbanites” who liked being “told that neither their tax dollars nor their own time need be spent on the cities they leave behind them at the close of each work day.” Nor, he pointed out, was her much-flaunted residence amid the Old World charms of New York’s West Village a privilege easily shared by slum dwellers.21 She returned the favor, once saying, “I thought he was a very destructive man … He thought that all should be wiped out and built new. Boy, in my books, he went down as a maniac.” When her interviewer suggested a comparison between Logue and Adolph Hitler, however, she issued a caveat: “So we were lucky.”22
A more subtle history of postwar urbanism must move beyond this stark and in many ways dist
orting dichotomy. Though Logue was quick to condemn what he considered excesses in both Moses and Jacobs, he learned from both of them. John Zuccotti, an admirer of both Logue and Jacobs and an important player in New York City’s housing and planning circles before becoming a successful developer, recognized the need for more balance. “It’s very hard to do what she [Jacobs] wants to do without some kind of government involvement. Excuse me, [but] if it wasn’t for the government, the private developers would have annihilated every old building in the City of New York … [But] I don’t blame them … That’s what it’s all about, right? Making money.”23 The urban renewal of American cities in the era of mass suburbanization deserves to be painted more in shades of gray than in black and white.
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF URBAN RENEWAL’S HISTORY
The relevance of this story of Ed Logue and the struggle over postwar urban renewal was constantly brought home to me as I worked on this book. I came to the project on the heels of the Hurricane Katrina catastrophe in New Orleans during August 2005, and I researched and wrote as Katrina raised complex and important questions about how a city rebuilds after such extreme devastation. As I watched events unfold in New Orleans, the debates that animated Logue’s story—who’s in charge, who should have a say, who benefits, and who pays the bill—took on real-life resonance before my eyes. Similarly, the Great Recession of a few years later, with its massive wave of foreclosures and talk of shrinking cities, gave me another ringside seat from which to watch urban decline and strategies of revival. As my writing of this book neared its end, the urban housing crisis of our own time became more pressing. And the United States elected a real estate developer for its forty-fifth president, with yet unknown long-term consequences for urban policy.
This history of making and keeping American cities viable remains relevant in the twenty-first century because many cities are still challenged by formidable problems. Today, urban America contends with a sharp contradiction. The good news is that after years of disinvestment and disinterest from middle-class metropolitan residents who preferred to head back to the suburbs at the end of every workday—the reality that Ed Logue battled—urban living appeals again. Whether young professionals employed at start-ups and tech firms increasingly locating downtown or formerly suburban empty nesters returning to the city, these new urbanites are willing to pay more and live smaller to be in the city, so long as it is the prospering kind that has successfully transitioned from a declining industrial to a flourishing postindustrial economy. New York, Boston, San Francisco, Atlanta, Chicago, Los Angeles, and their peers are considered attractive; Detroit, Baltimore, Milwaukee, Newark, and Memphis much less so.
But now for the bad news. Low-income residents have few prospects in economically declining cities, but their options are also worsening in more dynamic urban areas. Despite the fact that their labor often keeps these cities running, lower-income people find it increasingly difficult to survive as better-off residents are drawn there. They find a shrinking supply of available housing because of the transformation of existing rental units into condos, the gentrification of formerly working-class and immigrant neighborhoods, and community resistance to building new affordable residential projects. Meanwhile, working people’s wages have stagnated as their rents continue to climb. The result is a severe national crisis. Increasing numbers of Americans are “rent-burdened.” Traditionally that meant paying more than 30 percent of income on housing. In the 1960s, a bit more than one-fifth of renters bore that burden. By 2016, almost one-half did. In an expensive city like Los Angeles, nearly a third of renters paid more than 50 percent of their income for shelter.
Nationwide, evictions are epidemic. And on any given night, more than half a million men, women, and children are homeless. Waiting lists for subsidized apartments and housing vouchers intended to help low-income Americans “move to opportunity” grow ever longer, so long that some cities have even stopped taking new names. Despite a sharp rise in the number of very-low-income households qualifying for rental subsidies, the amount of assistance available has barely grown, reducing the beneficiaries among the eligible from 29 percent in 1987 to 25 percent in 2015.24 The high levels of economic inequality that have exploded in the nation are even more extreme within its cities as market forces—little buffered in our neoliberal, anti-government age—reward the privileged and punish the rest. And inequality exists between cities as well. Wealthier cities command more resources than poorer ones to tackle their problems. But even thriving cities find it difficult to sustain efficient transportation, high-performing public services, and sound infrastructure, given the years of neglect and lack of government support. Internationally, the result of this American underinvestment is glaringly obvious simply by comparing mass transit systems in New York or Boston—among the most prosperous American cities—to Stockholm, Paris, or Shanghai, all places where a commitment to strong state subvention persists.
It is my hope that taking a deep dive into the long career of city redeveloper Edward J. Logue and the shifting regimes of urban policy within which he maneuvered will deepen our understanding of what it takes to make American cities dynamic and equitable. And it might just expand the repertoire of possibilities we can imagine for our own time, as we, too, continue to struggle to save America’s cities for all their residents and to fulfill the still-elusive aspiration of the 1949 Housing Act to provide “a decent home and a suitable living environment for every American family.”25
PART I
New Haven in the 1950s: Creating a Laboratory for Urban Renewal
1. The Making of an Urban Renewer
In September 1953, thirty-two-year-old Ed Logue returned to New Haven, Connecticut, with his wife, Margaret, to await the birth of their first child after six years away. They were resettling into a city that had launched Logue into adulthood. Here he had widened his horizons as a scholarship student at Yale College, had worked his first full-time job as a labor organizer, and had trained for a profession at Yale Law School. Here, too, he had met and married Margaret, the daughter of an influential couple in New Haven academic circles, the much-admired dean of Yale College William Clyde DeVane and his wife, Mabel Phillips DeVane. Casting about for his next career move after working in India for eighteen months as Ambassador Chester Bowles’s special assistant, Logue was considering hanging out his shingle as a New Haven lawyer.
But then opportunity intervened. Logue had arrived just in time to help with the mayoral campaign of the Democratic reform candidate Richard Lee, who was mounting his third attempt to be elected mayor of New Haven. The determined, thirty-seven-year-old hometown boy, “Dick” Lee, currently the director of the Yale News Bureau, built his run around an ambitious promise to “renew” what was undeniably a deteriorating New Haven. Factories were closing, downtown retail was stagnating, and middle-class residents were decamping for the city’s flourishing suburbs. These departures, furthermore, were fueling growing discontent among those remaining behind, who resented how the city’s property tax rates kept climbing simply to sustain existing services. Logue, identifying himself as a “longtime admirer of Dick Lee,” became a key player in Independents for Lee, an effort to position Lee as an alternative to business as usual as practiced by New Haven’s Democratic Party machine. The third time was the charm, and Lee claimed victory on the night of November 3, 1953, with 52.3 percent of the vote.1
Within weeks of his election, Lee invited Logue to be his executive secretary, an ostensibly part-time post that Lee created to tap the unique combination of smarts, energy, and vision that he saw in Logue. Logue accepted, but it quickly became apparent that the job was much bigger, more like an unofficial deputy mayor. They lost little time collaborating on an ambitious plan to remake New Haven as “a slumless city—the first in the nation,” as they liked to say.2 In February 1955, Lee officially appointed Logue as the development administrator of the New Haven Redevelopment Agency. Logue’s brilliance at garnering newly available federal urban renewal
funds, combined with Lee’s intimate knowledge of New Haven, made them an irrepressible and nationally admired team who could boast that they were attracting more federal dollars per capita to New Haven than any other American city was getting. The masterful politician and his bureaucratically savvy partner together piloted schemes in New Haven that other cities would watch and copy.
Medium-size New Haven, a struggling old industrial city in an increasingly suburban postindustrial age, became the model city of urban renewal, a laboratory for salvaging urban America. The problems that Dick Lee and Ed Logue were addressing were faced by many American cities that had flourished with the rise of America’s industrial might in the nineteenth century. Now, in the second half of the twentieth, these cities were atrophying as their manufacturing bases disappeared. Strategies to renew American cities would evolve continually for at least two more decades, in response to new ideas, mistakes made and learned from, the ebb and flow of funding, and political pressures exerted from many quarters, most notably policy makers in Washington and critics at the grass roots. The successes and failures of Dick Lee and Ed Logue’s efforts in New Haven reveal how the urban renewal project fared in its first phase during the 1950s.
ED LOGUE, LIBERAL NEW DEALER
The charges brought against urban renewal by the mid-1960s as pro-business, undemocratic, and racially biased would have been anathema to the Ed Logue who joined forces with Dick Lee. He was by personal history and self-perception quite the opposite: a political progressive on many fronts who viewed urban renewal as the next worthy liberal cause demanding immediate government action.