In time, the consequences—both positive and negative—of Logue and Lee’s approach to physical planning, social services, citizen engagement, and administrative strategy would become evident. Despite acknowledging some rough patches—such as a long-stalled Church Street Project—the renewers felt optimistic. Macy’s finally signed on and the gaping big hole in downtown would soon open as the Chapel Square Mall. Neighborhood renewal was progressing in the Oak Street, Wooster Square, and Dixwell areas, and being planned elsewhere. Changes in the Housing Act of 1954 had enabled the renewal of Wooster Square to favor greater rehabilitation, not just demolition—proof, according to Logue, “that we could rebuild a neighborhood with a scalpel not a bulldozer.”134 As early as 1957, Logue wrote to Bowles, “Dick and I now believe that if the projected New Haven plan is carried through to completion, our position in 1976 will be stronger in every way than that of the suburbs around us.”135
Nonetheless, there were frustrations. Limitations in the federal programs that enabled their work were one kind. The seemingly unstoppable flow of people and resources to the suburbs was another. But probably the most serious challenge of all came from within the New Haven community and grew out of a paradox at the heart of the renewers’ own liberal agenda. Despite their conviction that what Dahl labeled pluralist democracy was a democratic mode of citizen engagement, their simultaneous championing of a new kind of urban professional to represent the public interest promoted a top-down structure that kept decision-making in the hands of experts. Although these experts may not have been the sort of dominating political elites whose existence Dahl set out to deny, they were elites of another sort. When Logue and his star staff, oriented toward the national stage, went to work, they inevitably measured their program’s success by how it fared in grant competitions in Washington and in the eyes of their professional peers. How ordinary New Haveners felt inevitably mattered less. While residents grumbled some discontent throughout the 1950s, it would take until the 1960s—after Logue had left for Boston—for them to register the full extent of their complaints. By May 1967, when LBJ’s National Commission on Urban Problems held hearings in New Haven, there was no mistaking the protests of at least some New Haveners.
Mayor Lee welcomed the commission hearings as a public relations opportunity for the city (and himself), a chance to show off spunky New Haven to a national audience. Logue would do the same in Boston when the commission visited there the next day. The commission members had put New Haven and Boston on their itinerary to pay homage to Lee and Logue’s reputation over a dozen years for innovation in urban renewal and anti-poverty programs. But despite New Haven’s finely tuned PR machinery, the commission hearings in New Haven developed in a way that the renewers hadn’t planned on, making it clear that all was not quite so well. In fact, there was “trouble right here in Model City,” to paraphrase the hit song “Ya Got Trouble,” from a popular musical of the era, The Music Man. Invited speakers and commission members alike may have expected to watch a well-rehearsed performance of “New Haven, the Incubator of Urban Innovation,” but they were in for a surprise. Uninvited speakers would demand the floor at those hearings to give voice to a very different perspective on New Haven’s great experiment. Race, which had always been an issue in New Haven, now took center stage.
3. Trouble Right Here in Model City
On a Thursday morning, May 25, 1967, the well-known liberal Democrat and three-term Illinois senator Paul H. Douglas led his distinguished National Commission on Urban Problems to New Haven to hear testimony about how millions of federal dollars expended over more than a decade had underwritten a multifaceted attack on slums and poverty in this “model city.” Chairman Douglas, a passionate advocate for urban America, and the commission’s other members had been appointed by President Lyndon Baines Johnson the previous January. Their assignment: to investigate a myriad of technical problems faced by cities related to zoning and land use, building codes, taxation structures, and the like—pesky bugs in what Johnson believed was a challenging but improving urban
picture, thanks to his ambitious Great Society programs. After undertaking inspections and hearings in twenty-two cities all over the United States, listening to testimony from hundreds of experts and ordinary citizens alike, the commission published its findings in December 1968 as Building the American City, accompanied by five volumes of hearing transcripts and numerous research reports. President Johnson was not pleased with the commission’s conclusions. Months of bearing witness to the disturbing realities of urban life had led the commission to claim, “We found problems much worse, more widespread, and more explosive than any of us had thought.” Its members decided that they “could not lose sight of the relationship between these technical matters and social problems. We agreed … not to duck the tough issues of poverty and race.”
What Douglas’s commission found was that despite Johnson’s programs, American cities were in full-blown crisis, suffering most profoundly from an inadequate supply of decent, affordable housing, particularly the public housing that numerous housing acts had promised. Of the eight hundred thousand units authorized to be built in the six years after 1949, it had taken nearly two decades for only two-thirds to go up, more than half of them small apartments for the elderly. And the commission despaired of finding remedies, given the foot-dragging and timidity of the federal bureaucracy and Congress; antiquated fiscal structures overly dependent on the property tax; misconceived zoning and building codes; the ineffective and fragmented state of metropolitan government, ill-equipped to cope with the disturbing reality of “a white suburban noose” surrounding troubled, more racially diverse inner cities; stubborn, pernicious patterns of segregation within cities; and much more. Twenty-four months of immersion in the problems of urban America, punctuated by two rounds of urban riots—in the summer of 1967 and following Martin Luther King’s assassination on April 4, 1968—had led the commission to see this urban crisis “as a test of our most fundamental beliefs,” whether the nation had “faith in freedom, in equality, in justice, enough to make sacrifices in their cause.” Exceeding President Johnson’s charge, the commission called for even greater federal action, including the construction of more than two million housing units annually with half a million reserved for low- and moderate-income families. Johnson, incensed at what he perceived as an indictment of his substantial urban accomplishments, tried to suppress the report. Only Douglas’s press savviness ensured its release in full.1
Many of these worrisome findings echoed what New Haven’s officials had themselves experienced firsthand. In testifying to the commission, they certainly boasted of their achievements, but they also made no secret of the difficulties they had faced working within the limitations of federal urban renewal. In fact, they were likely among the commission’s most outspoken tutors in what was going wrong, not just going right, in the nation’s attack on its urban problems.2
New Haven was the second stop after Baltimore on the commission’s ambitious fact-finding tour of American cities. Mayor Dick Lee, honored and excited to display the work that he and Ed Logue had masterminded in New Haven, decided to hold the hearing at one of the jewels of their urban renewal program, the modernist Conté Community School in the recently rehabilitated Wooster Square area. A lineup of practitioners and social scientists was carefully assembled to give expert testimony to the commission as it sought to learn from New Haven, because, as its chair explained, “This city illustrates as much, if not more, than any other city in the country, what an urban renewal program can do,” and its mayor “has had more experience on the subject than almost any other man in the country.” In traveling to New Haven, the commission’s members flattered Mayor Lee that they were “bring[ing] the mountain to Mohammed.”3 The next day the commission would head north to Boston to hear from Logue about his work both there and earlier in New Haven, a city with which he was still very strongly identified. Acknowledging Logue’s talents, Chairman Douglas complimented hi
m as “one of the stars in the urban firmament, probably one of the most creative and original thinkers and also a man of action.”4
The meeting began according to plan. Mayor Lee spoke first, submitting a written statement and then elaborating orally. He took pride in community schools like Conté, Community Progress Inc.’s pioneering Operation Head Start, the relocation of industry to Long Wharf, and the ongoing renewal of neighborhoods and downtown. But he also seized the opportunity to complain about imperfections in the federal laws and regulations that stymied his team. Three obstacles particularly frustrated them and, in turn, preoccupied the commission during this hearing: the inadequacy of federal funding available for renewal on the scale of New Haven’s when there were so few local alternatives, the lack of sufficient provision for replacement housing for residents who were dislocated from redeveloped areas, and the difficulty of addressing the city’s problems without having jurisdiction over the full metropolitan area.
Lee lost little time proclaiming, “We do not have … the kind of financial resources which we feel are necessary really to meet the programs on a broad enough basis.” The lack of money for low-income housing and human resource programs was particularly galling when the need was so great and subsidies for agriculture and space exploration seemed to flow so generously.5
Lee and his colleagues depended so much on the Feds because they had few alternative sources of funding closer to home. Whereas the private sector had famously claimed to have orchestrated Pittsburgh’s Renaissance through the corporate-dominated Allegheny Conference on Community Development, with minimal public expenditure, New Haven was smaller and enjoyed much less support from local business and industry. Lee and Logue had organized a field trip of two planeloads of New Haven’s leaders to Pittsburgh in 1957 to show them how it had been done there, but New Haven (like most other American cities) could hardly rival Pittsburgh’s extraordinary status as headquarters for Mellon Bank, U.S. Steel, Alcoa, Jones and Laughlin Steel, Pittsburgh Plate Glass, Westinghouse, and other major companies.6
In New Haven, as in many cities without deep-pocketed corporations or at least ones willing to empty them locally, the reality was quite different—and quite the opposite from what urban renewal’s critics on the Left often charged: that the program was promoted by a “pro-growth coalition” uniting civic and corporate leaders in pursuit of their common interests in the urban economy, often at the expense of ordinary citizens.7 That might have worked in wealthier places, but in New Haven and other struggling cities of the 1950s and 1960s, the challenge was simply to get businesses to care enough about revitalizing the city and not run for the exit.
Lee had learned this lesson early. When he campaigned for mayor in 1953, he promised to establish a Citizens Action Commission within sixty days of taking office. It took him nearly a year, because he had so much trouble finding someone willing to become chair. Typical, he said, was “one of the biggest men in the city” who had refused him so as not “to get tagged with a project that was so ethereal as to be doomed before it got off the ground.”8 The urban theorist Neil Brenner has argued persuasively, in fact, that the pro-growth coalition operated most importantly not on the municipal level, but rather on the national stage in promoting federal redevelopment legislation—what he calls the “national institutional envelope”—that protected large-scale corporate capital and put local political actors into “an iron cage of sorts” as they competed with other cities for private-sector investment.9 Years later, Logue would reflect on the struggle to identify partners in the local business community: “Dick and I could never find standup businessmen in New Haven … They just weren’t there.”10 When Jeanne Lowe published a comprehensive study of urban renewal in several cities, she particularly lamented the lack of initiative shown by New Haven’s business community: “Almost everything of consequence that has taken place in New Haven in the past dozen years has been stimulated, put together and forwarded from City Hall, either directly or indirectly.”11 Aware of the private sector’s reluctance, the Lee and Logue team tried knocking on the doors of nonprofit foundations. That led to important seed money from the Ford Foundation and small grants from the New Haven Foundation, but nothing on the scale of what they needed.
Local revenues were no more promising. The only major sources of income the city had were already fragile: property taxes and the sale of municipal bonds for capital improvements.12 As New Haven’s property values and population declined, sustaining property tax revenue became difficult. It didn’t help that a third of all property in the city was tax-exempt, given Yale’s extensive real estate holdings.13 Lee hated to raise the tax rate to make up for the shortfall; that only encouraged more residents and businesses to flee—and cost him votes. Although he finally felt obligated to raise taxes in 1960 and 1962, he quickly reduced them in 1963. Lee preferred to raise tax assessments strategically on certain properties.14
The structure of taxation in Connecticut further constrained the city’s revenue options. Although Governor Chester Bowles had courageously, to Logue’s mind, tried in the late 1940s to repeal the sales tax and enact an income tax to increase state revenues and introduce more progressivity into how services were funded, it would take many more years, until 1991, for Connecticut to adopt an income tax.15 At the time of the commission hearing in 1967, 75 percent of New Haven’s revenue still came from the property tax.16 With few alternatives, city officials promoted urban renewal as a way of increasing property tax revenue, even as they regretted their dependence on this tax.17
New Haven’s reliance on federal funding required it to mold its programs to the laws’ strict specifications, about which Lee also complained. When Lee and Logue came into office, the Federal Housing Act of 1949 was about to be amended as the Housing Act of 1954. Although the 1949 Act had promised to “remedy the serious housing shortage,” the fine print about how that could be accomplished discouraged the public housing provided for in the 1937 Housing Act, written as it was with the blessing of a real estate industry wanting few public alternatives to the private market.18 Lee and Logue were far from fans of public housing. Referring to Elm Haven Extension, a huge, high-rise public housing complex in Dixwell under way before he became mayor, Lee lamented that “public housing like that isolates people. You’re a project family. Low-income public housing almost caused more problems than it solved. We are out of the business of that kind of concentration.”19 Logue would retain a similar dislike of public housing throughout his career, much preferring subsidized mixed-income projects.20 But the two also recognized that in many cases—such as for African Americans and large families discriminated against in the private real estate market—public housing was the only option.
The 1954 Housing Act seemed to offer greater flexibility. Whereas its predecessor aimed redevelopment solely at “blighted” residential areas, stressed total clearance, and did not allow for the rehabilitation of existing buildings, this revised act made what was now labeled “urban renewal” more ambitious and varied. Lee and Logue took full advantage of the permission now to fund the redevelopment of “predominantly residential” areas, not just “solely residential” ones, such as New Haven’s Church Street. They also embraced provisions permitting spot clearance for scattered site housing and, notably in Wooster Square, rehabilitation and stronger code-enforcement in older structures rather than requiring their replacement by new construction. In his testimony to the commission in Boston, Logue openly regretted the mistakes made during those early days of “bulldozer urban renewal that removed one population and replaced it with another.” He assured the commission, “Let me just say we will never do that again,” and promised that the sole high-rise housing being built in Boston was on the waterfront, where “the only creatures that are being displaced are fish.”21
But even as the 1954 act broadened the scope of urban renewal to include downtowns like New Haven’s, it also drew attention and resources away from the original, and still critical, goal of creating more
affordable housing for low-income residents. Logue’s difficulties providing decent relocation housing for those dislocated worsened as the building of low-income housing became a lower priority in federal urban renewal and harder to fund. Logue felt frustrated that the existing residential subsidies were so limited, primarily providing for elderly housing and moderate-income nonprofit co-ops.
Lee’s second major complaint to the commission concerned this huge unmet need for replacement housing. He told them, “Relocation is our principal problem, not only residential or family relocation but also business relocation.”22 What Lee considered Logue’s expert relocation operation too often met impossible obstacles.23 Mike Sviridoff’s wife, Doris, who served as deputy director of housing relocation, complained of difficulties like “having to deal with the same family now for the third time, because they’d be moved from Oak Street to the Hill, and from the Hill to some other declining neighborhood, and to not very good housing. But then the renewal program would enter that neighborhood.”24 Some of the problems came from New Haven’s redevelopers prioritizing other kinds of building projects, such as the luxury towers on Oak Street, that were never intended to rehouse low-income residents. They aimed instead to keep middle-class families in the city, thereby fulfilling the criticism frequently made of Title I of the Federal Housing Act that it took land from the poor, often minority, and gave it to middle- and upper-income residents, usually white.
But city officials also tried to tap federal programs to provide improved housing for those who were desperate for it. They made extensive use of the 221(d)(3) provision of the Federal Housing Act subsidizing cooperatives sponsored by nonprofit organizations such as churches, community groups, and labor unions. Sponsors received 100 percent Federal Housing Administration (FHA) loans with forty-year terms and below-market interest rates, which they used to build housing for moderate-income people who put $325 down, paid a below-market monthly fee, and ended up owning a home. If the units were rented instead, then tenants paid about 20 percent less than market price. In either case, tenants paid no more than 25 percent of income, with the difference subsidized by federal funds. The city also arranged with a local foundation to provide interest-free loans to help with the $325 down payment.
Saving America's Cities Page 13
