Saving America's Cities

by Lizabeth Cohen

  128. Logue, interview by Dahl and Polsby, Dahl, Box 1, Folder “Interviews I–R,” 29. That purchase price was then converted to an annual rental, per University Towers Inc.’s agreement; “Construction Expected to Start Next Week on 16-Story University Towers Structure,” NHR, July 22, 1958.

  129. Bernard J. Frieden and Lynn B. Sagalyn, Downtown, Inc.: How America Rebuilds Cities (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), 44. Martin Anderson, a conservative critic of urban renewal based on the government’s violation of private property rights, also objected to it for the difficulty that private developers had turning a profit in their renewal activities; The Federal Bulldozer: A Critical Analysis of Urban Renewal, 1949–1962 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1964), 107–23.

  130. H. Ralph Taylor, interview by David G. McComb, March 25, 1969, Washington, D.C., General Services Administration, National Archives and Records Service, Lyndon Baines Johnson Library, transcript, 6–8; “13-Term N.Y. Congressman James H. Scheuer Dies at 85,” WP, September 1, 2005; “Capitol Park,” The Cultural Landscape Foundation, https://tclf.org/content/capitol-park-washington-dc; Pritchett, Robert Clifton Weaver and the American City, 175, 195–96, 214 on Scheuer’s progressive stands on integrated housing. For more on Scheuer’s involvement in Southwest Washington and the challenges facing the developer in urban redevelopment, see Lowe, Cities in a Race with Time, 175–95.

  131. Pei, interview. For more on Zeckendorf’s involvement with Southwest Washington, see Lowe, Cities in a Race with Time, 174–200.

  132. Pei, interview.

  133. Quote from Ed Zelinsky in Rob Gurwitt, “Death of a Neighborhood,” Mother Jones, September–October 2000, http://motherjones.com/politics/2000/09/death-neighborhood, 4.

  134. Quoted in Talbot, Mayor’s Game, 137. New Haven was the first city to make use of the new provision in the Housing Act of 1954 for rehabilitation of existing structures; Powledge, Model City, 39.

  135. Logue to Chester Bowles, letter draft, May 15, 1957, EJL, Series 4, Box 23, Folder 13, 1.

  3. Trouble Right Here in Model City

      1. Building the American City: Report of the National Commission on Urban Problems to the Congress and to the President of the United States (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1968), preface, vii–viii; introduction, 1–31, with final quote 31; statistics on poor progress on building housing from Howard E. Shuman (executive director of the commission), “Behind the Scenes and Under the Rug,” WM, July 1969, as quoted in Fred Powledge, Model City: A Test of American Liberalism; One Town’s Efforts to Rebuild Itself (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970), 121. For Johnson’s reaction to the commission’s report, see Roger Biles, The Fate of Cities: Urban America and the Federal Government, 1945–2000 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2011), 155–59.

      2. Description of the New Haven hearing of the National Commission on Urban Problems is based on Hearings Before the National Commission on Urban Problems, vol. 1, May–June 1967: Baltimore, New Haven, Boston, Pittsburgh (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1968), 110–86, quotes on 111; Mandi Isaacs Jackson, Model City Blues: Urban Space and Organized Resistance in New Haven (Philadelphia: Temple University Press), 109–13; Douglas W. Rae, City: Urbanism and Its End (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 349–51.

      3. National Commission Hearings, 111.

      4. National Commission Hearings, 187–265; Douglas quote on 188.

      5. National Commission Hearings, 113, 128, 138.

      6. Frank O’Brion, president of New Haven’s Tradesmen’s Bank and chair of the New Haven Redevelopment Agency, acknowledged that “there’s just no comparison” between New Haven and Pittsburgh, with its “hundreds of multi-million corporations who have their headquarters” there; Frank O’Brion, interview by Robert Dahl and Nelson Polsby, September 23, 1957, New Haven, CT, Dahl, Box 1, Folder “Interviews I–R,” transcript, 6–7. For a thorough discussion of urban redevelopment in Pittsburgh and the role played by the private sector, see Jeanne R. Lowe, Cities in a Race with Time: Progress and Poverty in America’s Renewing Cities (New York: Random House, 1967), 110–63. It should be noted that although Pittsburgh’s downtown redevelopment did not involve federal funding, the slum clearance of the Lower Hill, begun in 1955, did. And recent scholarship has suggested that there was more ideology than reality to Pittsburgh’s crediting of the private-sector for its renewal success; “Forum: Pittsburgh’s Renaissance Revisited,” JUH 4, no. 1 (January 2015): 3–46.

      7. On pro-growth coalitions, see John Mollenkopf, The Contested City (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983); Andy Jonas and David Wilson, eds., The Urban Growth Machine: Critical Perspectives, Two Decades Later (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999); John R. Logan and Harvey L. Molotch, Urban Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987).

      8. Richard C. Lee, interview by Robert Dahl, September 13, 1957, New Haven, CT, Box 1, Folder “Special Interviews and Reports by Ray Wolfinger,” transcript, 7, also 9; see in addition, Logue, interview by Robert Dahl and Nelson Polsby, September 3, 1957, New Haven, CT, Dahl, Box 1, Folder “Interviews I–R,” transcript, 1–2; Ray Wolfinger, “This is Ray on November 2 dictating a number of items dating from my stay in the Mayor’s Office,” November 2, 1958, Dahl, Box 1, Folder “Special Interviews,” 33.

      9. Neil Brenner, “Is There a Politics of ‘Urban’ Development? Reflections on the U.S. Case,” in The City in American Political Development, ed. Richardson Dilworth (New York: Routledge, 2009), 126, 130.

    10. Logue, interview, Schussheim, transcript, 22.

    11. Lowe, Cities in a Race with Time, 546–47.

    12. Allan R. Talbot, The Mayor’s Game: Richard Lee of New Haven and the Politics of Change (New York: Harper and Row, 1967), 150–52.

    13. Powledge, Model City, 127. By 1970, 44 percent of New Haven’s grand list of taxable property was tax-exempt; Peter Hall, “Is Tax Exemption Intrinsic or Contingent? Tax Treatment of Voluntary Associations, Nonprofit Organizations, and Religious Bodies in New Haven, Connecticut, 1750–2000,” in Property-Tax Exemption for Charities, ed. Evelyn Brody (Washington, DC: Urban Institute Press, 2002), cited in Nikolas Bowie, “Poison Ivy: The Problem of Tax Exemption in a Deindustrializing City, Yale and New Haven, 1967–1973,” Foundations 3, no. 2 (Spring 2009): 5. For years the city tried unsuccessfully to get Yale to contribute to the city’s revenues; finally, in 1978, the state instituted a PILOT (payment in lieu of taxes) program that required colleges to reimburse municipalities like New Haven for 25 percent of what local property taxes would have yielded. In 1990, Yale also agreed to make a separate annual payment to the city for fire service, so long as no Yale nonacademic properties like dormitories and skating rinks were assessed for taxes. Patrick Flaherty, “An Analysis of PILOT (Payment in Lieu of Taxes), Windham, Connecticut,” May 15, 2007, Connecticut Center for Economic Analysis, University of Connecticut, 7–8; the state gradually raised the percentage of payment required. Conflict continues to rage between the city and Yale over PILOT payments.

    14. Wolfinger, “This is Ray on November 2,” Dahl, 30. The Harris Poll of 1959 revealed a good deal of worry among respondents about tax increases; Louis Harris and Associates, “A Survey of the Race for Mayor of New Haven,” February 1959, EJL, Series 4, Box 26, Folder 59, 15, 24, 27.

    15. Logue, interview by Jean Joyce, October 22, 1976, Bowles, Part 9, Series 3, Subseries 3, Box 398, Folder 199b, transcript, 64–65.

    16. National Commission Hearings, 124. During the many years before Connecticut implemented an income tax, it depended on the property tax, the main source of income for cities and towns, and the sales tax, which was at the highest rate in the country for a long time; from the NYT: “Resistance to a Connecticut Income Tax Is Strong,” March 20, 1971; “Tax Increases Are Adopted in Connecticut, an 8 Percent Sales Levy Will Be Highest in U.S.
,” May 31, 1989; “Connecticut’s Precarious Tax Solution,” June 11, 1989; “Region Rethinks Its Dependence on the Sales Tax,” March 27, 1992.

    17. Lee, interview by Dahl, 23; also see “Cities: Forward in Connecticut,” Time, June 24, 1957, on Lee’s ambitions for increasing tax assessments. Ralph Taylor made the same arguments to Dahl about how the increase in property tax revenue would make urban renewal self-supporting; H. Ralph Taylor, interview by Robert Dahl, September 4, 1957, New Haven, CT, Dahl, Box 1, Folder “Interviews S–Z,” transcript, 23. On substantial increases in tax assessment in the Oak Street area between 1959 and 1970, see Raymond E. Wolfinger, The Politics of Progress (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1974), 297, and Lee testimony, National Commission Hearings, 124. The Fainsteins concluded in their analysis, however, that the increases in property assessments resulting from urban renewal were hardly impressive, particularly when one took into account the city’s cash and in-kind contributions to urban renewal; Norman I. Fainstein and Susan S. Fainstein, “New Haven: The Limits of the Local State,” in Susan S. Fainstein, Norman I. Fainstein, Richard Child Hall, Dennis R. Judd, and Michael Peter Smith, Restructuring the City: The Political Economy of Urban Redevelopment, rev. ed. (New York: Longman, 1986), 49–50.

    18. Eugene Rostow, interview by Robert Dahl, October 31, 1957, New Haven, CT, Box 1, Folder “Interviews S–Z,” transcript, 15. The literature is extensive on the Housing Acts of 1949 and 1954; for a short summary, see Jewel Bellush and Murray Hausknecht, eds., Urban Renewal: People, Politics and Planning (New York: Anchor Books, 1967), 3–16. Public housing survived the House of Representatives by only five votes, and progress was very slow on building the units authorized; Eugene J. Meehan, “The Evolution of Public Housing Policy,” in Federal Housing Policy and Programs, Past and Present, ed. J. Paul Mitchell (New Brunswick, NJ: Center for Urban Policy Research, Rutgers University, 1995), 299.

    19. On Lee’s objection to public housing, quote in William Lee Miller, The Fifteenth Ward and the Great Society: An Encounter with a Modern City (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966), 88; Robert A. Solomon, “Symposium: Building a Segregated City: How We All Worked Together,” Saint Louis University Public Law Review 16, no. 2 (1996–97), 21.

    20. “New Haven Pursuing the American Dream of a Slumless City,” NYT, September 7, 1965.

    21. National Commission Hearings, 191.

    22. National Commission Hearings, 115.

    23. For Logue’s pride in the relocation effort, Logue, interview, Schussheim, 29. Logue claimed that New Haven was the first urban renewal program in the county to establish a business-relocation office; Logue, “In Defense of Urban Renewal,” letter to the editor, NYT, September 25, 1994, in Robert C. Ellickson, Urban Legal History: The Development of New Haven; Class Materials, vol. 2, Yale Law School, Course Pack Spring 2005, 712.

    24. Mitchell Sviridoff, ed., Inventing Community Renewal: The Trials and Errors That Shaped the Modern Community Development Corporation (New York: Milano Graduate School, New School University, 2004), 162.

    25. Bernard Asbell, “They Said It Wouldn’t Happen in New Haven: Dick Lee Discovers How Much Is Not Enough,” NYT Magazine, September 3, 1967. On 221(d)(3), see Talbot, Mayor’s Game, 141–43. Also, Powledge, Model City, 71–74, and Wolfinger, Politics of Progress, 196–97, on subsidies, loans, and rental programs.

    26. Catherine Bauer Wurster published her classic Modern Housing in 1934 and coauthored the Housing Act of 1937 with its provision for public housing. She remained a vocal advocate for public-supported housing until her death in 1964. Correspondence between Logue and Bauer Wurster in the Catherine Bauer Wurster Papers, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, Box 21, Folder 21, containing letters with Logue from 1957 to 1963. Ralph Taylor studied with her at the Littauer School at Harvard in 1947 and credited her with inspiring him to undertake a career in housing and city building; H. Ralph Taylor, interview by Lizabeth Cohen, April 21, 2006, Chevy Chase, MD. I am grateful to Nancy Cott for alerting me to the Bauer Wurster correspondence with Logue. Also see Samuel Zipp, “The Roots and Routes of Urban Renewal,” JUH 39, no. 3 (May 2013): 359–65.

    27. Asbell, “They Said It Wouldn’t Happen in New Haven,” NYT Magazine; Wolfinger, Politics of Progress, 197; Phillip Allan Singerman, “Politics, Bureaucracy, and Public Policy: The Case of Urban Renewal in New Haven” (Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University, 1980), 205–6, which has slightly different figures.

    28. Rae, City, 339; New Haven Redevelopment Agency, “Housing Report,” February 20, 1969, in Powledge, Model City, 119. Rae acknowledges that not all moves were under compulsion; some people welcomed the help in moving.

    29. National Commission Hearings, 117.

    30. U.S. Census Bureau, Census of Population 1950 and 1960, in Jeff Hardwick, “A Downtown Utopia? Suburbanization, Urban Renewal and Consumption in New Haven,” Planning History Studies 10, nos. 1–2 (1996): 42; Fainstein and Fainstein, “New Haven,” Tables 2.1 and 2.2, 31; Wolfinger, Politics of Progress, 16.

    31. National Commission Hearings, 123; also 128–29, 134, 145. Sviridoff agreed; Inventing Community Renewal, 145.

    32. National Commission Hearings, 207.

    33. National Commission Hearings, 129.

    34. Harris quote in Richard Balzer, Street Time (New York: Grossman, 1972), 32, and in Jackson, Model City Blues, 110–11. For more on Harris and the HPA before and after these hearings, see Powledge, Model City, 152–77; Yohuru Williams, Black Politics/White Power: Civil Rights, Black Power, and the Black Panthers in New Haven (New York: Brandywine Press, 2000), 68–105; Harold Antonio Neu, “The Hill Parents Association and the Challenge of Community Action” (senior essay, Yale College, 1989), in possession of the author.

    35. National Commission Hearings, 142–43.

    36. Wolfinger, “This is Ray on November 2,” Dahl, 19–21; Wolfinger, Politics of Progress, 284–85.

    37. Lowe, Cities in a Race with Time, 425. Also see Polsby, Community Power and Political Theory: A Further Look at Problems of Evidence and Inference (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1963; 2nd enlarged ed. 1980), 75, and Linda Prokopy, “Talking with State Street Businessmen,” AIM: The Bulletin of the American Independent Movement 2, no. 8 (November 25, 1967): 6, 8, which recounts public hearings where the city’s side went on so long “that by the time it comes to the citizens’ chance to speak, they’re either exhausted or feel inadequate to confront all these officials.” A draft plan for the public hearing on the Church Street Redevelopment Project, to take place July 24, 1957, reveals this orchestration as well as the community leaders and renewal committees asked to testify; “Aldermanic Committee on Streets and Squares, Public Hearing,” July 24, 1957, EJL, Series 5, Box 72, Folder 611.

    38. Quoted in Dane Archer, “New Haven: Renewal and Riots,” Nation, June 3, 1968, 731. Established community leaders were often hired by the Redevelopment Agency to serve as neighborhood staff. For example, in Wooster Square, Theodore De Lauro, who had grown up in the area and had been a neighborhood leader most of his adult life, was hired for the important post of “neighborhood representative.” Anthony Paolillo, another neighborhood leader, was hired as project assistant to help in the field office; Wooster Square Design: A Report on the Background, Experience, and Design Procedures in Redevelopment and Rehabilitation in an Urban Renewal Project, prepared by Mary Hommann (New Haven, CT: New Haven Redevelopment Agency, 1965), 29.

    39. Russell D. Murphy, Political Entrepreneurs and Urban Poverty: The Strategies of Policy Innovation in New Haven’s Model Anti-Poverty Project (Lexington, MA: D. C. Heath, 1971), passim, with particular attention to 41, 51–53, 151–52 for quotes. Quotation from the CPI deputy director in Howard W. Hallman, “Planning with the Poor: A Discussion of Resident Participation in the Planning of Community Action Programs” (paper delivered at the Conference on Community Development), Ford Foundation Arch
ives, PA #62–29, cited in Alice O’Connor, “Community Action, Urban Reform, and the Fight Against Poverty: The Ford Foundation’s Gray Areas Program,” JUH 22, no. 5 (July 1996): 614. Also see Peter Marris and Martin Rein, Dilemmas of Social Reform: Poverty and Community Action in the United States (New York: Atherton Press, 1967), passim on CPI and New Haven.

    40. National Commission Hearings, 155–58. This sea change in the political environment was noted by many involved in New Haven’s urban renewal; see Talbot, Mayor’s Game, 211–12, where he called it “direct citizen action”; Powledge, Model City, 68–69, 145–46, 251.

    41. National Commission Hearings, 185–86; on Cook and AIM, see Jackson, Model City Blues, 127, 166–72. AIM published AIM: The Bulletin of the American Independent Movement twice a month from April 1966 to March 1970, and it is now in the Yale Library. Urban renewal—or “urban removal,” as the Bulletin referred to it—was frequently the topic. A special issue published August 31, 1967, covered the New Haven riot. “A Position Paper on Urban Renewal—Prepared by the American Independent Movement Sub-Committee on Urban Renewal” appeared in November 1967. Several months later, another organization, the Coalition of Concerned Citizens (CCC), was organized by Dr. William Ryan and his wife, Phyllis, relative newcomers to New Haven, who, as social activists, were frustrated with the political status quo in their new home. (In 1971, Dr. Ryan would publish an important work of sociology, Blaming the Victim.) The CCC criticized “the unchecked continuation of injustice and inequality in this city … These are only symptoms of the real disease that grips New Haven: the decline of democracy.” On CCC, see Powledge, Model City, 183–90, quotes on 183–84.