The Redevelopment Agency experimented with other approaches as well. It secured substantial funding to build housing for low-income senior citizens, who made up a significant portion of the poor but were often considered less threatening by white neighbors than minority families, particularly ones with teenagers. Where possible, the renewers constructed small clusters of affordable apartments scattered within middle-class neighborhoods. It experimented with supplementing rents of low-income tenants by paying the landlord the difference between what prospective occupants could afford and the market rent. And it developed what was called a “rent certificate” or “leased housing” program, in which the Housing Authority rented flats directly from private landlords and then subleased them to low-income families at the same cost as public housing. The “turnkey” housing program went even further. Here the city purchased low-income housing constructed by private developers and “turned the key over” for rental at subsidized rates.25 With all these efforts to provide affordable housing, New Haven’s urban renewers identified with the “housers” of the 1930s and 1940s, such as Catherine Bauer Wurster, whom they greatly admired for lobbying for European-style social housing in the United States and with whom they shared frustrations over a limited success.26
By the time the commission arrived in New Haven in 1967, it was quite clear that creating subsidized, racially integrated housing was nearly impossible at a scale even approaching the amount needed, particularly if high-rise public housing was shunned. By then, rehabilitation and new construction had swept across 30 percent of the city’s land area. About 9,000 old dwelling units had been rehabbed and some 2,600 new publicly assisted units built.27 Figuring out how well that met the need is difficult, but the analyst Douglas Rae estimates that during Lee’s sixteen years in office, somewhere between 22,000 and 30,000 individuals, or about 10,000 households—approximately a fifth of the city’s population—were forced to move. In 1969, close to the end of Lee’s reign, the Redevelopment Agency would put the number of relocated households somewhat lower, at 6,970. The numbers were huge either way.28
Lee’s final major complaint to the commission focused on an issue that he realized was not solely the responsibility of the federal government; states and localities had a role to play as well. As Lee put it bluntly to the commission, “The cities are not able to project their thinking beyond the borders of their own cities.”29 Witness after witness echoed the mayor’s concern, lamenting the lack of any metropolitan governance to help cities share their problems with the wealthier suburban communities that increasingly surrounded them. By one alarming calculation, the population of the New Haven suburban ring increased by 51 percent between 1950 and 1960, while the city’s population fell by 7.5 percent. Already by 1950, New Haven’s population had slipped to 62 percent of its standard metropolitan statistical area (SMSA), down from 81 percent in 1920, and the downward trend was just gaining steam. By 1960 it was only 50 percent, and by 1970 it would reach as low as 39 percent. And to make matters worse, the wealthier were leading the exodus out of town. Whereas in 1950 New Haven’s median income was 86 percent of its SMSA, by 1960 it was 80 percent and by 1970 would fall to 67 percent. At the low end of the income spectrum, 17 percent of the city’s residents in 1960 had incomes of less than $3,000 a year, while only 7 percent in the SMSA did.30
Without metropolitan-scale resources, cities like New Haven were left holding a half-empty bag. Relocating tenants, for example, suffered for lack of access to the full metropolitan area. Racial integration of housing and schools was similarly constrained. Despite Lee’s passionate hopes for a solution, however, he admitted to the commission, “I do not believe it is possible under the very strong traditions which New England has in maintaining the separate jurisdictions which these towns and cities have.” Voluntary cooperation, maybe. By law, he concluded, “it is not only unlikely but impossible.”31 This absence of metropolitan-level problem solving would anger Logue throughout his career in urban renewal, including the very next day, when he told the commission in Boston: “The local suburban governments in America, in every metropolitan area I know, positively discourage low-income families of different races from coming out and sharing in the amenities of suburban life.”32 In the early 1970s, when working in New York State, Logue would finally find a way to take on the metropolitan issue—with dramatic results.
PROTEST FROM THE FLOOR
After the mayor finished speaking at the hearing, the commission prepared to move on to hear testimony from two prominent urban experts: Jack Meltzer, director of the Center for Urban Studies at the University of Chicago, and Mike Sviridoff, founding director of CPI from 1962 to 1966 and now vice president of national affairs at the Ford Foundation, replacing Paul Ylvisaker. Suddenly, an uninvited speaker, a local man named Fred Harris, burst out:
You people have listened to the Mayor. How about listening to us? If this is supposed to be a public hearing, you should allow the public that are involved in all this redevelopment area to speak their opinion … How are you people helping us when you listen to people like that, that decide what happens to our lives, and we are never given a chance to speak up and say what we think should help our neighborhoods?… You have got the man presenting a big whitewash up here.33
Harris was no stranger to New Haven’s urban renewers, even if he was unknown to the commission members. The twenty-nine-year-old New Haven native was the leader of the Hill Parents Association (HPA), an organization he and his wife, Rose, had founded in 1965 to protest what they considered a racist curriculum and appalling physical conditions at their children’s school in the Hill, one of the poorest neighborhoods in New Haven. After securing toilet paper for the students’ restrooms, new paint and books, and a black principal at the school, the group had moved on to community issues: better police treatment; improved housing, particularly for the many newcomers to the neighborhood who had been displaced by urban renewal projects elsewhere; more parks and playgrounds; and a greater voice in New Haven’s redevelopment and famed anti-poverty program, CPI. The HPA became the major opponent of the Redevelopment Agency’s initiatives, its leaders speaking out boldly at public hearings and lobbying city agencies on behalf of the Hill neighborhood. Although Harris had not been asked to testify at the National Commission hearing—the urban renewers preferring to explain their program’s deficiencies themselves—a friend in city hall apparently tipped him off and he and eleven other HPA members showed up at the Conté School, demanding to be heard. “We knew … that Mayor Lee was going to be speaking for the people of New Haven,” Harris later recounted. “Now ain’t that a bitch? He lives in good housing and sure as hell didn’t get us good housing, so how was he going to speak about housing for us?” Harris and his colleagues had filed into the Conté School auditorium and, finding no open seats, sat down on the floor in front of the stage, from where he now rose to speak.34
Despite Harris’s interruption, the commission stuck to its schedule. Sviridoff submitted a written statement that praised “the vision and imagination of Mayor Richard Lee that shaped a new kind of urban renewal program in America” and recalled how “Ed Logue and I worked hand in hand under Dick Lee’s direction in an attempt to tackle the total problem,” as attentive to human renewal as physical renewal. With an irony Sviridoff did not seem to notice, given how his status as an expert had protected his spot in the speaker lineup while Harris was silenced, he went on to quote admiringly from Chairman Douglas’s own call in 1933 for organizing the weak to give them what “the world respects, namely power,” without which the “permanent benefits of Rooseveltian liberalism [will] be as illusory as were those of the Wilsonian era.” Sviridoff then urged opening the New Deal door even wider in their own time: “Only the active and fullest possible participation of the neighborhood people in such a program [of renewal] can yield lasting and meaningful results.” Soon Sviridoff, fulfilling his role as Ford Foundation urbanist, was supplying the kind of ammunition that would arm the commission in atta
cking Johnson’s urban policies as too limited. He reminded the panel that the highly touted poverty program received only one-fifth of 1 percent of the gross national product, when in 1938 Roosevelt spent fifteen times that on public works alone—“and that was not enough.” As national leaders called for domestic cuts to support the Vietnam War, Sviridoff feared “a mockery of our lofty goals.” He concluded, “If our cities decay beyond repair, and if poverty undermines the very fabric of the country, what kind of society do we have left to defend?”35
Finally, the commission gave Fred Harris his turn. With his words, he transformed the focus of the meeting from the goals and challenges facing urban renewers to the impact their work was having on New Haven’s poorest residents, the citizens they claimed to want to help. Unsurprisingly, Harris deplored how redevelopment had saddled New Haven’s low-income residents with many years of evictions and exorbitant rents. But he directed his harshest criticism at the way urban renewal decisions were made, drawing a parallel with how the city and the commission had failed to invite “the people that are involved in the neighborhood … to speak for themselves” at this hearing. “The people don’t have no voice here,” he argued, referring to both exclusions. Echoing Sviridoff’s call for neighborhood involvement but challenging the sincerity of his commitment, he urged, “If you involve the people in the neighborhoods, they feel as though they have a part. They feel as though they are helping to decide what is going to happen to their community.” Harris made it clear that New Haven’s poorest residents wanted what urban renewal promised: better housing, good schools, effective job training, and other kinds of government assistance. But they also wanted the opportunity to define those programs for themselves.
PARTICIPATORY DEMOCRACY
In making his case for the lack of community say in New Haven’s urban renewal, Harris was expressing an alternative vision of how democracy should work to the pluralist democratic ideology and practice of the urban renewers. The political scientist Dahl had delineated their pluralist consultative process, with its roots in the New Deal era of the 1930s and 1940s and confidence that public officials—armed with administrative expertise, political muscle, and federal dollars—were best situated to represent the public interest, mediating between conflicting and often self-serving private interests. For Harris and community activists like him all over the country by the mid-1960s, however, democratic governance required much fuller participation by people at the grassroots—an ideal that I will label “participatory democracy.” This more open, deliberative process, they contended, would give greater voice to those most affected by important decisions, who brought firsthand experience more useful than the knowledge of so-called experts or the establishment leaders they preferred to consult.
Harris had good reason to doubt that pluralist democracy was working well for his community. Vehicles of consultation that Logue and Lee claimed supported a democratic process of decision-making often discriminated against those with less access and power, more often than not lower class and minority. Many fell outside the organized interest groups represented on the CAC, which then removed their perspectives from Dahl’s feedback loop. The voting and opinion polling that the renewers hailed as referenda on urban renewal discriminated against the displaced without stable addresses. The views of those caught in the crosshairs of redevelopment were rarely solicited more informally. In the forty-nine lengthy interviews that Dahl carried out in 1957–58 to test his pluralism theory, he never talked to any residents of the Oak Street neighborhood that was bulldozed for the Connector and luxury apartment towers.
These poorer citizens found it no easier to give testimony at the public meetings Logue championed. Wolfinger reported to Dahl how “the city customarily prepares very elaborate public hearings … in order to make a powerful case for the project.”36 The journalist Jeanne Lowe’s largely sympathetic national investigation of urban renewal nonetheless described one such biased hearing on demolishing the Oak Street neighborhood in 1955. She observed the “six-foot Chief of Police in his dress uniform” testifying to more than six arrests in this area a day, the fire chief reporting that calls were “600 percent higher than the rest of the city,” the city court judge claiming that prostitution was greater here than in any other neighborhood, and so on. After the redevelopment staff presented its case, “anyone opposed to redeveloping Oak Street would have been championing crime, disease, juvenile delinquency and higher taxes. Not a voice was raised in protest.”37 A critical perspective like this one, from a displaced black resident, had few public outlets: “Man, there used to be people—thousands of real, live, people living on Oak Street. It wasn’t the classiest place in town, but it was home. Today you can’t see a poor face on Oak Street, or a black face either.”38
The HPA had singled out CPI for condemnation long before Harris arrived uninvited at the National Commission hearings. The growing tension was well captured in a participant-observer study by Russell D. Murphy, a Yale Ph.D. student who went on to teach at Wesleyan and publish Political Entrepreneurs and Urban Poverty: The Strategies of Policy Innovation in New Haven’s Model Anti-Poverty Project. Murphy embedded himself in CPI from 1962 to 1966, years of both the agency’s prominence under Sviridoff’s pluralist democratic rule and its increasing vulnerability to attack by activists lobbying to give program participants greater authority. Ultimately, the HPA would file a formal complaint to the federal Office of Economic Opportunity, demanding that “at a minimum a majority of the Board of Directors of CPI … [must] be elected by the residents of the neighborhoods that CPI serves.” Murphy showed how, in carrying out human renewal, Sviridoff and his staff mirrored the pluralist democratic approach that the city’s physical renewal had undertaken. They established themselves as nationally acclaimed experts on urban poverty—creative and capable innovators of social renewal programs. They institutionalized community support not from consulting citizens directly, but by hiring hundreds of employees from the target neighborhoods to engage with clients. The CPI’s nine-member board, moreover, was a mini-version of the elite CAC. It included “some of New Haven’s most outstanding citizens,” such as the minister of the Dixwell Avenue Congregational Church, the world’s oldest African American United Church of Christ congregation, and other representatives of established community organizations like the Board of Education and the United Fund, along with Yale and local business leaders.
By the mid-1960s, however, this highly centralized, top-down CPI, run by what its deputy director would term a “democratic elite … taking a harmony of interest approach,” found itself more and more under attack by those he described as promoting a “populist … conflict approach.” To satisfy the Office of Economic Opportunity, CPI leaders reluctantly agreed to expand the board to sixteen to allow for the election of one additional member from each of the seven neighborhoods then being served, relieved to have warded off the more extreme demand of giving neighborhood representatives a board majority.39
Several other speakers during the contentious National Commission hearing confirmed Harris’s message. Professor Herbert Kaufman, chair of the Yale Political Science Department, praised the renewers’ success in “build[ing] what amounts to a new bureaucracy” with “new teams” of talented, professional experts in charge of both the redevelopment and human progress sides. But he warned that the political landscape of the nation was changing, with “a new form of fragmentation developing at the local level, represented by the claims of groups that hitherto have been unorganized.”40 Robert Cook, an assistant professor of sociology at Yale who headed a mostly white radical organization supportive of the Hill parents, the American Independent Movement (AIM), was more polemical, accusing Lee’s urban renewal regime of taking a “totalitarian approach … antithetical to the American democratic tradition … We suggest dispersing the power, allowing the talents and abilities of the bulk of people in the city and country to be mobilized in a new way.” Cook concluded on a note that echoed Harris’s: “If you s
tart to decentralize … you get more participation, more interest, and a growth of people’s abilities to participate in a plan and work for themselves.”41
What Kaufman and Cook did not need to say aloud because it was so well understood was that the increasingly militant social movements of the 1960s, particularly Black Power and the New Left, were now mounting a substantial challenge to the prevailing liberal pluralist democratic order. Yet despite their intense conflict, both sides articulated a commitment to democracy. Renewers and critics alike lived in a Cold War world where democracy was deeply valued, even if it took on variable meanings. Lee closed his statement to the commission with an exhortation to the entire nation to do more “to make our cities showplaces of democracy.”42 Harris, for his part, declared, “As long as we have officials sitting back drawing up plans for our neighborhoods,” they are not “involving the people like it’s supposed to be in a so-called democratic society.”43 President Johnson’s Community Action Program, the centerpiece of his War on Poverty, had raised democratic expectations even higher for Harris and his peers by requiring “maximum feasible participation” of citizens in formulating social programs.
It is worth noting that another uninvited speaker at the hearings, a conservative New Haven resident named Stephen J. Papa, also called for more listening “to the people who know the needs of the people in New Haven” to stem the tide of the middle-class exodus to the suburbs. Papa and his fellow Republicans shared the Left’s criticism of the Lee-Logue regime as undemocratic in violating majority rule, such as when its appointed Board of Education promoted school desegregation and its Redevelopment Agency built scattered-site affordable housing in neighborhoods hostile to it. They in fact anticipated how calls for a more grassroots democratic mobilization against mainstream liberalism would in time travel from the political Left to the political Right.44
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