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Urban Neighborhoods in a New Era
Revitalization Politics in the Postindustrial City
By Clarence N. Stone, Robert P. Stoker The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2015 The University of Chicago
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-28915-1
CHAPTER 1
Change Afoot
Martin Horak, Juliet Musso, Ellen Shiau, Robert P. Stoker, and Clarence N. Stone
The narrative of urban change in North American cities has most often focused on the business district with its office towers, luxury hotels, convention centers, festival marketplaces, and, frequently now, sports arenas. For many years neighborhoods bore the burden of change and received little in return. Secondary attention to aging neighborhoods underscored their neglect and political impotence. Except for predatory lending, housing finance sent its dollars mainly to the suburbs. Expressways ate chunks of inner-city land and in the process often created barriers to neighborhood-level travel, while the same multilane highways connected the business district with seemingly ever-extending suburbs. The poor, near poor, and other nonaffluent residents of the central city were thoroughly marginalized — displaced and disregarded, never part of the power-wielding body of insiders who set agendas, targeted investments, and guided the public discourse about the city's future. In light of such a past, it may be tempting to embrace pessimism about the marginal status of distressed neighborhoods, but we see in recent trends the emergence of a different neighborhood narrative — one containing multiple possibilities, one not structurally foreordained to end in decline and despair. Still, perils to neighborhood well-being have by no means disappeared. The new narrative is about possibility, not an accomplished reversal of fortune.
In today's highly mobile world, why focus on urban neighborhoods, particularly those in distress or danger of decline? The often-made claim to be "a city of neighborhoods" suggests that, although the business district may be the economic core, the quality of urban life is heavily residential in character. Without neighborhoods in the picture, research provides a truncated view of the city and its politics. Urban Neighborhoods in a New Era aims to correct this by highlighting residential neighborhoods, not as phenomena in and of themselves, but as part of a wider picture of city politics and policymaking.
Cities and their politics are not static phenomena. As conditions change, so also do motives and capacities to act. In its approach to political change, this book focuses on distressed urban neighborhoods. It differs from much work in urban politics in three ways:
1. Neighborhood policy, not revival of downtown, is the lens for viewing the politics of cities.
2. This neighborhood lens shows that an important shift in the political order of cities has occurred, and this shift makes some past characterizations of neighborhood politics increasingly problematic in the cities of today.
3. To better understand, and possibly improve, the political prospects of distressed neighborhoods, this book turns to a reform agenda that, while acknowledging structural inequality and its challenge, recognizes a role for political agency. It thus offers an alternative to a long-reigning narrative of urban-policy failure (cf. M. Katz 2011).
As cities have left the industrial age further and further behind, the narrow pursuit of economic development and growth as an overriding aim has been modified; the economic imperative has become less distinct and now intermingles with other considerations. We do not mean to suggest that the economic imperative has been displaced; to the contrary, growth remains a central local priority. However, economic development is no longer seen as a necessarily discrete and privileged domain. The intermingling of community-level concerns with economic development has become part of a new era in city politics. Neighborhood issues — such as fighting crime, educating children, putting youth on a constructive path into adulthood, boosting opportunities for gainful employment, and, yes, enhancing the general quality of residential life — are factors in economic growth even as economic growth itself continues to be seen as the sine qua non for city vitality.
In the new postindustrial geography, neighborhoods with market potential can readily become revitalization targets. Hence market processes are now seen as something not always tied tightly to the central business district (CBD). The new geography includes varied sites — especially those that feature anchors such as universities, medical schools, and hospitals. Access to mass transit stations has also risen in import, as has the nearby presence of parks and other recreational facilities (including those for nightlife). Desirable housing stock — whether because of its architecture, location, or both — is also a source of market potential. This is by no means to suggest that markets are always a positive force. To the contrary, many places continue to be plagued by disinvestment and its manifestation in abandoned properties, neglected upkeep, and scarce retail. A need to battle blight remains very much part of the neighborhood picture, but in some places the possibility of gentrification and its various ramifications exists too.
In a complex urban setting, all segments of the city share a common ecology. The CBD is affected in myriad direct and indirect ways by what happens in the residential areas that encircle it and vice versa. At the same time, economic growth, the fight against blight, and responsiveness to community concerns do not create a smooth fit. The mix is laden with tension, and conflict often surrounds the particulars. Community concerns often extend well beyond the narrow economic agenda that comes most readily to business elites. For their part, residents of distressed neighborhoods often emphasize public safety (especially containing violence among the young) and link this concern to a need for organized recreational activities. Prominent also are calls for maintaining adequate services, ranging from trash pickup and fixing potholes to drug treatment and aiding senior citizens who have limited family support.
Because there is nothing formulaic about the relationship between economic growth and neighborhood vitality, there is bound to be friction. In governing, policymakers are guided by neither a controlling consensus about the well-being of the city nor a technocratic calculation of the best path to follow. Instead, the concerns of distressed neighborhoods are inevitably part of a political process in which interests conflict and information is never complete. Short-term and immediate considerations often supersede broader and long-term views. Sundry motives come into play. Making a governing mesh from such fractious forces is the task of politics, and we examine this process in the belief that some versions of this mesh are better for improving neighborhood conditions than others. But before we draw any conclusions about how more hopeful trajectories of neighborhood policy might be forged and sustained, we need an understanding of what is happening at present.
We pursue this aim in multiple steps in this chapter. We first set the broad context for the six city narratives that come later in the book. This context is centered in a long-term shift from the redevelopment politics dominant in the years following World War II to the politics of today's postindustrial city. The shift involves a decline in the cohesion and concentration of policymaking power at the elite level (in Robert Salisbury's 1964 term, a "convergence of power") and the rise of more diffuse patterns of policymaking. We next discuss how the new era of neighborhood politics took shape as gradual recognition of intensifying problems set the stage for fresh thinking about the interconnections between urban problems. As a result, neighborhoods experienced modest and limited gains as subjects of policy attention. We then discuss neighborhood distress and revitalization strategies. Although it has many components, we emphasize neighborhood distress as a political problem that tests a community's capacity to engage in constructive problem solving. Finally, we sketch an analytic framework for political reform that encompasses both structural inequality and constrained political agency. The framework focuses analytic attention on the middle ground between structural determinism and free-ranging agency. Constraint derives significantly from a politics of interactions between highly unequal players: on one side is an upper stratum containing an assemblage of elite players with substantial resources, who often play a major part in agenda setting, and on the other side is a lower stratum of actors with limited resources and a history of being marginal players in urban politics.
A Major Shift
Our study of six North American cities bears evidence of an important change in the political position of distressed neighborhoods. Though far short of revolutionary proportions, change is afoot. When cities were in the early stage of transition away from the industrial era, progrowth coalitions placed economic development in a protected position, insulated it, and downplayed neighborhood problems and the collateral damage residents suffered as economic-development initiatives accelerated and amplified a socially disruptive process of change (Friedland and Palmer 1984; Logan and Molotch 1987; Dreier, Mollenkopf, and Swanstrom 2004). Today, this once-entrenched policy pattern has altered. Across the six cities we have studied (our study cities are Baltimore, Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Toronto), policy actors have come increasingly — though in some cases reluctantly — to treat economic development and neighborhood vitality as aims not easily kept separate and apart.
While the intermingling of policy domains has become an important trend across cities, significant variation in detail is also evident. Local institutions and elites differ in how they respond to issues, and the contemporary scene is now populated with a wide variety of neighborhood-related policy practices and programs. Among them are transit-oriented development (TOD), community benefits agreements (CBAs), HOPE VI and its successor modifications such as Choice Neighborhoods, and — onetime foundation favorite — Comprehensive Community Initiatives (CCIs). Thus, there is room for significant city-level variation in the ways in which policymakers see and address neighborhood issues.
As cities adapted to a postindustrial economic base, new actors entered the policy process and some existing participants changed their policy aims. Although efforts undertaken by local government remain a central part of the picture, private foundations have emerged as key actors in many cities, sometimes promoting initiatives that combine neighborhood revitalization issues with economic development. Such crosscutting policy actions put community-based organizations in a changed situation. As economic growth ceased to be treated as a separate arena, neighborhood-level participants could take up development issues in fresh ways. In earlier times, faced with what they regarded as a hostile agenda, neighborhood leaders mobilized to protest and resist freeways and other development projects. They are now better positioned (in some cases) to view development as an opportunity to secure community benefits. Neighborhoods still find reasons to protest, but the strategic goal has changed. Rather than seeking to protect neighborhood integrity by a go-for-broke effort to derail an intrusive economic-development agenda, neighborhoods can seek to participate in the policy process and make claims for the sake of community improvement. Bargaining for benefits is a more flexible approach than purely defensive opposition. Initiatives such as anticrime programs or TODs become opportunities for neighborhood actors to pursue a multifaceted community improvement agenda.
Setting the Stage: Cross-Time Comparisons
In turning to a broad look at how this crucial shift in neighborhood policy and politics came about, we follow the example of Robert Salisbury (1964), who compared the politics of his time with the politics of an earlier era. Writing a half century later than Salisbury, we employ a different schema of periodization, but for the same purpose — to understand politics and policy in the contemporary city by contrasting it with politics and policy in the preceding time period. Salisbury looked back at the industrial city to highlight what was distinctive about the politics of the transition away from the industrial city. Douglas Rae covers the same cross-time comparison in what he terms the end of urbanism (2003). In work that forms an essential complement to Robert Dahl's Who Governs? (1981), Rae examines Mayor Richard Lee's struggle to cope with technological and economic change as New Haven's industrial base declined and its suburbs grew. He contrasts the politics of Lee's mayoralty with that of Frank Rice, mayor of New Haven a half century earlier.
Salisbury, Rae, and others focus on city politics in a period of major transition. From roughly the end of World War II to the beginning of the Reagan presidency, cities went through a makeover period to adjust to industrial decline. A distinct politics of transition lasted for more than thirty years. We emphasize the word "transition" because a top-level effort was mobilized with the goal of saving the city through reshaping its central business core. For an extended time urban politics was driven by this change agenda. Salisbury argued that this period experienced a "new convergence of power." For several cities it was a time in which the politics of machine versus reform gave way to the joined efforts of city hall and downtown business leadership to guide the city through redevelopment and the extensive change in land use that it brought about.
During this transition period, neighborhoods often found themselves relegated to the political sidelines. In these years the pursuit of economic growth enjoyed a protected position in the policy process, insulated from everyday politics, from community concerns, and from worries about worsening social problems. Scholarly research has consistently confirmed the marginal political status of neighborhoods during this time period.
Our Salisbury-inspired aim is not to reanalyze this thoroughly researched period but to revisit it in order to set up a comparison with today's emergent postindustrial city and specifically the place of neighborhoods in the politics of this emergent city. We use the comparison to identify a latter twentieth-century shift in which distressed neighborhoods received increased local attention as places in need of revitalization. Although federal policy in the United States displayed a new level of indifference toward cities during these same years, urban neighborhoods began to gain greater local policy attention as well as, in many instances, significant philanthropic attention. This change involved no dramatic upheaval and is perhaps not widely recognized. Notwithstanding, we maintain that a basic shift in policy thinking and practice has emerged. While neighborhoods are seldom the top local priority, they can often claim positive consideration. However tentatively and incompletely, residents of urban neighborhoods have gained recognition as part of the policy puzzle that confronts cities.
Some may question this assertion. After all, structural inequality persists, and racial stereotyping and discrimination continue to shape the physical and social character of cities (Sampson 2012). In contrast with the earlier period, in which federal money heavily subsidized alterations in land use, today cities find themselves the largely neglected stepchildren of national politics. Presidential campaigns come and go with barely any mention of the urban condition. What's new, then? Although economic growth is still a local priority, it no longer occupies the highly privileged and protected position it once held. "People concerns" — police-community relations as a crime-control strategy, education and youth opportunities, workforce development and employment — have risen to a level at which economic development and a loose assemblage of community-based issues now intertwine. Cities embrace population growth (including from immigration) as an important objective. Human capital has become part of wider thinking about economic growth. The same applies to crime prevention and antiviolence campaigns. Because it is viewed as a contributor to problems in such areas as education and public safety, concentrated poverty has emerged as a condition to address. In some places youth development has gained standing as a key concern.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Urban Neighborhoods in a New Era by Clarence N. Stone, Robert P. Stoker. Copyright © 2015 The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
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