During the interlude, the nine communities continued to discuss the issue, and by January 1973 six of them had issued “positive responses” acknowledging at least some need for low-income housing. Ever optimistic, Logue took that as a good sign. He said on January 16 that the UDC would welcome more conversations with towns and was willing to negotiate further on housing location and other complaints. But pretty soon it became evident that the whole game had changed and the UDC’s ability to carry out its Fair Share Housing plan was being seriously undercut. Almost since its creation, enemies in the New York state legislature had been trying to clip the UDC’s wings and deprive it of its override powers. But whenever such a bill made it through the legislature, the governor would veto it. “Rockefeller would always beat back the effort to take this override out of the law,” Logue later acknowledged in appreciation. “Which is why I loved him, he stood up for me.”34 In October 1972, some New York state representatives had even tried to push a bill through Congress to deny federal funding to any project lacking local community approval, until the House’s recess put an end to debate.35
Now, in the wake of the tsunami of hostility created by the Nine Towns plan, opposition to the UDC’s override grew overwhelming. In June 1973, Rockefeller saw no alternative but to sign a new bill curtailing the UDC’s power to override local zoning in New York State’s villages and towns, while keeping it in its cities. But he offered Logue a deal as compensation: an additional $3 million appropriation to cover the costs of closing down the project and an increase from $1.5 to $2 billion in bonding authority. Logue didn’t blame Rockefeller. “Rockefeller was the last guy to leave that sinking ship, the last guy. And he saw that I got bailed out.”36
Logue was not happy to have lost the battle against exclusionary zoning in the suburbs. The Boston Globe’s Marty Nolan, now the chief of the paper’s Washington bureau who had watched Logue successfully manage similar uproars in Boston, called it “a stinging defeat.”37 Indeed, once given permission to ignore the UDC, all nine towns retreated from considering subsidized housing. And the removal of the UDC’s override powers had a domino effect in the state. It brought an unhappy resolution, for example, to a long-standing battle on Long Island over building subsidized housing in the unincorporated hamlet of Wyandanch, with its overwhelmingly poor, African American population of fifteen thousand, 68 percent of whom were on public assistance in 1969. The community had begun lobbying the UDC in 1970 to construct urgently needed new housing. By June 1972, designs—by a black architect—were completed for twenty-nine clustered, two-story garden-apartment buildings with 182 units to serve low- and moderate-income tenants. After the state took away the UDC’s override, more than a thousand Wyandanch residents turned out for a rally and signed a petition urging continued support for the UDC housing, only to watch the Babylon Town Board, which had legal jurisdiction over Wyandanch, reject it two months later, on the suspect basis of its “adverse impact” on the community’s high water table. “The blacks all supported it, 150 percent,” Logue fumed, “and the goddamn white bigots killed it.”38
Logue took some solace in the settlement Rockefeller proffered, appreciating the new resources at his disposal. The whole episode, moreover, entered the UDC’s canon of macabre humor when staff members created a satirical book for Logue titled “The Story of ‘The Suburban Destruction Corporation’ (SDC): E. J. Rogue, President, and the Warm and Wonderful World of Westchester.” Large pages featured collages of headlines and illustrations cut out of newspapers and magazines along with text deriding the disaster. One page carried the headline “Dissatisfaction Guaranteed or Your Zoning Back.” Another showed a photo of a large group of men, women, and children in colonial costumes with the caption “Speaking on behalf of the Bedford Historical Society, Mr. Rogue, we have carefully considered your nine towns program, we have considered the alternatives, we have polled our people and it is our collective opinion that you should respectively stick the whole thing up your ass.”39
The Nine Towns controversy raised some of the same questions that had troubled Logue since his earliest days doing urban renewal in New Haven: Who’s in charge, who should have a say, who benefits, and who pays the bill? Once again, Logue found himself contemplating what a democratic process in planning decisions—his much-touted “planning with people”—should really mean. Already skeptical about letting what he considered excessive participatory democracy overshadow professional expertise, his Nine Towns experience only discouraged him further. He wondered anew what form of community consultation might make more possible the kind of social change he judged to be legal and moral.
Logue was not alone in this rumination. Even progressive critics of top-down planning struggled with the conflict between valuing grassroots democratic participation and breaking the seemingly intractable hold of racial segregation. Paul Davidoff, the chief theorist of “advocacy planning” (a movement committed to giving communities, particularly their low-income and minority members, a greater voice), had established the Suburban Action Institute in White Plains, the county seat of Westchester, in 1969. As its executive director, he vigorously battled exclusionary zoning in the courts, his greatest victory in later years being the Mount Laurel decision of the New Jersey Supreme Court requiring all towns to build low- and moderate-income housing. Davidoff applauded the UDC’s efforts in Westchester and followed its struggle closely, convinced that the greater good was being served.40
In contrast, an eighty-four-year-old, increasingly reactionary Robert Moses, who appeared in Northern Westchester in the midst of the crisis to receive a distinguished service award from a conservative arts organization, took the opposite view, ironically—given his own past insistence on top-down control—siding with the people against the big planner. He accused Logue of trying “to force projects into the suburbs … No wonder local people are embittered.” And he urged the residents of Northern Westchester to “go slow,” “acquire more parkland,” and if necessary “consider [yourselves] a separate county.”41 When it came to Fair Share Housing, Davidoff and Moses endorsed the strategy most consistent with their attitudes toward civil rights, not the mode of decision-making that they had promoted throughout their careers.
As the difficult year of 1973 came to a close, Logue fought to contain the damage from the Nine Towns setback. There remained much for the UDC still to tackle. Despite the victory scored by the UDC’s enemies, Logue had no intention of letting Westchester become his Waterloo.
THE MAKING OF A CRISIS
The Fair Share fiasco would probably not have doomed the UDC were it not for its unfortunate convergence with a number of other problems—only some within the UDC’s control. Looking back, it may seem obvious that the Nine Towns defeat marked the beginning of the end for the UDC. But at the start of 1974, no one could know whether this defeat was simply a rough patch in the road or the first steps in a death march. “It may not have ever come to that [end] except for this terrible, perfect storm of horrible events,” lamented the UDC staffer Pangaro.42
The first winds of the gathering storm had actually hit earlier in the year, just as the UDC was readying to renew its discussions with the Westchester towns when Rockefeller’s cooling-off period came to an end on January 15, 1973. A week before, on January 8, the Nixon administration had announced that it was impounding all congressionally appropriated federal funding for housing, regardless of whether projects had already been approved, were under consideration, or had not yet advanced to review. Following his first election in 1968, Nixon had allowed HUD secretary Romney to continue and even expand Johnson-era federal housing programs, biding his time. But now, emboldened by his landslide reelection victory against the Democratic opponent George McGovern two months earlier, Nixon made his move. With little notice, the White House proclaimed a national moratorium on housing subsidies of all kinds for eighteen months, to last until July 1, 1974, when Nixon promised a more cohesive housing and community development program that would replace what he fe
lt was the federal government’s ineffective and excessive involvement in urban renewal and housing provision.43 Although Romney had agreed to stay on as HUD secretary until Nixon’s second inauguration in late January, he had submitted his resignation the day after Nixon’s election, deeply opposed to where Nixon’s policies were headed and angrily feeling undercut. Over the next two months, he railed against the “message to me that all the good we have accomplished is to be undone.” The White House, he complained, was “discriminating against central cities” in a “hard headed, cold hearted indifference to the poor and [with] racial prejudice.”44 With Romney’s departure in January 1973, the UDC lost a friend in a high place.45
Nixon’s moratorium was the opening salvo in his larger agenda to devolve the locus of policymaking from Washington to the states and localities, a major break with the postwar American welfare state that had developed gradually from Roosevelt’s New Deal and Truman’s Fair Deal to Kennedy’s New Frontier and Johnson’s Great Society. At every stage, the federal government had expanded its funding and strengthened its control. Whether Nixon’s reorientation was labeled the “New Federalism,” revenue-sharing, or block grants, his administration’s intent was to give states, and less so more Democratic municipalities, greater discretion in spending and weaker oversight from Washington. This approach aimed to appeal to Nixon’s growing number of southern, suburban, and white working-class voters. The White House also intended for this restructuring to decrease spending on social programs like housing. Now, “power, funds, and responsibility will flow from Washington to the States and to the people,” Nixon promised. “The high-cost, no-result boondoggling by the Federal Government must end.”46
This devolution of authority should not theoretically have penalized a state-level agency like the UDC. But Nixon’s impoundment created a severe, eighteen-month drought in the dispersal of federal subsidies, and then once new policies were in place, urban-oriented agencies like the UDC found themselves beholden to state legislatures dominated by unsympathetic rural and suburban interests. The constituents of suburban legislators, Logue argued, will always demand “that state aid to local government be maintained intact at whatever the human cost to programs which serve primarily the poor, the powerless, and the minorities.”47 Despite Nixon’s assertion that funds would now flow more directly to states and their cities, big-city mayors were quick to recognize a threat, huddling within weeks of the president’s announcement at the New York mayor John Lindsay’s Gracie Mansion to consolidate their opposition.48 Logue at first held out a small hope that there might be some way of using Nixon’s draconian measure to cut back on Washington’s top-down control over local priorities and to increase the dollars going directly to housing subsidy programs. But he concluded, “One thing is entirely certain to us. There is no way to reduce Federal expenditures and still meet America’s housing needs. If anything, additional funds will be required.”49
That was not to be. The replacement legislation, the Housing and Community Development Act of 1974, with its Community Development Block Grant program, amplified the thrust of the State and Local Assistance Act of 1972, which had implemented revenue sharing. Federal spending now was steered away from the nation’s major northern cities toward suburban population centers and the new cities of the Sunbelt.50 In an essay penned in 1976, Logue complained that the “whole new approach of federal assistance … called the ‘block grant’ program” had “purported to minimize red tape” but was raising “serious doubts … about the adequacy of federal funding.” He pessimistically concluded, “There is little reason to believe that troubled central cities will be able to reverse their present period of decline.”51 A new era had indeed arrived. Federal urban renewal—in existence for twenty-five years since the Housing Act of 1949—had enjoyed a decidedly mixed record, but it had kept federal attention on cities and had served as the lodestar for many careers in urban redevelopment, including Logue’s. And now it was effectively ended. Regardless of whether a Republican or a Democrat was president, the federal government would no longer ensure a uniform set of national policies for American cities.
In place of direct federal funding for urban redevelopment and subsidized housing, the new approach would channel money further down the command chain, ranging from states to highly localized community development corporations, and depend more on private-market solutions to help needy households. Some programs still worked well, but they were part of a regime change that sought greater decentralization in programs, less redistribution of financial resources, and more decision-making authority by local politicians than urban experts. There would be little construction of new public-sector housing, reduced attention to racial inequality and poverty through federal programs like Model Cities and Community Action, wider dispersal of spending throughout the nation with less going to major cities, significant fragmentation—at times non-coordination—in urban policy and practice, and a shift in balance from the public to the private sector through rental vouchers and subsidies to developers. If they were aggressively entrepreneurial, the private, nonprofit community development corporations could secure federal funds, though given their limited, often neighborhood-based scale and scope, their efforts rarely cohered sufficiently to add up to a citywide or even broader metropolitan strategy for combating deep-seated urban problems.52
As Logue feared, Nixon’s moratorium proved devastating for the UDC. Predicting that only luxury housing would now be built, Logue warned of a “drastic slowdown and cutback in publicly assisted housing,” with far-reaching ramifications, including “widespread unemployment in the construction industry.”53 Despite the fanfare the UDC had made over its state funding and bond revenue, the agency depended on regular infusions of federal dollars. At least 90 percent of all UDC projects used Section 236 mortgage subsidies to keep rents affordable, even for middle-income families, while also making use of other federal programs like the New Communities Act. In fact, if the New York state legislature had not already revoked the UDC’s override powers, it is very likely that the lack of federal funding would have prevented construction of the controversial Fair Share Housing in suburban Westchester anyway.
Frustratingly for Logue, his innovations at the UDC aimed at remedying long-standing flaws in federal urban renewal practices only worsened the impact of the Nixon moratorium. Such inventive strategies as fast-tracking projects before all financing was officially in place and bundling together partly finished projects in general-purpose bonds to spread the risk worked only so long as federal dollars kept flowing in. When Nixon shut off the funding faucet, innumerable housing developments were left high and dry at various stages of incompletion. Uncertainty about future subsidies, moreover, made it impossible to project whether rental revenues would cover costs. “Here I am hanging out half naked,” Logue said. “I’ve got these houses under construction, they’ll be bankrupt from the day they open without the subsidy.”54
Once again, Nelson Rockefeller came to the rescue. “As soon as it happened,” Logue recalled, “I called up … the Governor’s office and said, ‘Hey, I’ve got a problem. You have a problem. And I can’t solve it. The Governor’s got to solve it.’”55 Flashing his Republican bona fides, Rockefeller convinced the White House to reinstate funding for UDC projects already in the pipeline. The New Republic later estimated that “as a result of a much vaunted full-speed ahead, mode of operation known as ‘fast-track’ construction, UDC had had 58 projects underway without having gotten formal federal commitments.” In the magazine’s view, the “UDC would have collapsed had Rockefeller not had enough clout to get John Ehrlichman in the White House and persuade him to waive the moratorium on those projects.”56 Although the immediate crisis was averted, severe damage remained. The UDC was forced to implement a spending freeze and a 10 percent staff cutback.
With the UDC’s once-promising future looking bleak, Logue and his team frantically searched for alternative sources of funding.57 Selling more bonds was one option, exce
pt that the moratorium shook investor confidence because, Logue lamented, auditors felt obligated to disclose on offering statements that “we were building on land we didn’t own and that our subsidy contracts were not in place.”58 Nonetheless, when several months later Rockefeller offered Logue an extra half a billion dollars of bonding authority after the UDC’s loss of override power, he grabbed it to help soften the blow. But more bonding also meant taking on greater debt and dealing more with bankers and investors, who were growing increasingly skeptical about the UDC’s prospects.59 Logue made no secret of his final judgment about the moratorium. Writing in 1974, he blasted the “federal decree” for forcing the UDC into a “year of consolidation” rather than planned expansion, limiting housing starts to less than 3,500 units instead of the 15,000 expected, a pace one-fourth that of 1972.60 In October 1975, Architectural Record found Logue still storming over what he called “the most outrageous piece of public policy I have ever seen.”61
The UDC’s dependence on Rockefeller in coping with the Nixon moratorium crisis explains why the next squall in the perfect storm proved so damaging. In December 1973, Rockefeller announced that he was stepping down as governor, thirteen months before his term was set to expire, and passing the job on to his long-serving lieutenant governor, Malcolm Wilson. Rockefeller had both generous and selfish motives. Wilson had stood loyally by Rockefeller’s side for fifteen years, forever the best man and never the groom. As Rockefeller prepared to leave the office of governor, he thought that Wilson’s chances of succeeding him would increase with a year as governor under his belt. But Rockefeller was also still chasing his personal dream of becoming president. This would be his last shot. He was now sixty-five years old, and Nixon would not be able to run again in 1976. In search of more national exposure, Rockefeller left office to become chair of the Commission on Critical Choices for Americans, a bipartisan, politically centrist collection of forty-two prominent citizens who committed themselves to studying the national and international problems confronting the United States. Rockefeller handpicked the politicians, academics, and business leaders who served as commission members, including Logue in this elite group; set up shop in his privately owned former governor’s office in midtown Manhattan with former staff he convinced to join him; and provided the initial funding to get the operation off the ground.62 A year later, in December 1974, Rockefeller would move on once again, this time to become Gerald Ford’s vice president when a disgraced Richard Nixon stepped down.
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