American Urban Politics in a Global Age [8 ed.] 1138059374, 9781138059375

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American Urban Politics in a Global Age Bringing together a selection of readings that represent some of the most important trends and topics in urban scholarship today, American Urban Politics in a Global Age provides historical context and contemporary commentaries on the economy, politics, culture, and identity of American cities. The eighth edition of this wellrounded and popular urban politics reader maintains the wide variety of reading selections it is known for, as well as many “classics,” while adapting to current events and developments in urban politics, and engaging cities in a post-pandemic world. All-new readings and important editorial commentary include: • • • •

•

Recent political debates about policing, race, and ethnicity in the urban environment; The impact of climate change on cities, and their roles in mitigating it, as well as preparing for it; A discussion of gender politics in post-Trump American cities; A reflection on the increasing importance of private players in city- and metropolitics, from implications for governance, to the growing corporate aspect of smart city initiatives, designed to help urban governments provide important services across cities and metropolitan regions; and An examination of the COVID-19 pandemic, and its impact on cities, from the initial, devastating outbreak in New York City in March 2020, to recurring shutdowns, life, urban development, and social polarization post-COVID.

American Urban Politics in a Global Age remains an approachable scholarly resource for undergraduate and graduate classrooms, as well as a general, wideranging scholarly overview of the most important aspects of the field for researchers. It may be taught alongside City Politics: Cities and Suburbs in 21st Century America. Annika Marlen Hinze is an Associate Professor of Political Science and the Director of Urban Studies at Fordham University, USA. Her research and teaching focus on urban politics, identity politics, immigration, qualitative and mixed methods research, and gender politics in the United States, Canada, Germany, and Turkey. James M. Smith is an Associate Professor of Political Science and the Director of the Master of Public Affairs program at Indiana University South Bend, USA. His research focuses on urban governance and institutions in U.S. cities, and he teaches courses in the Political Science Department focused on American political institutions, and in the Master of Public Affairs program on urban planning and public policy.

Eighth Edition

American Urban Politics in a Global Age Edited by Annika Marlen Hinze and James M. Smith

Designed cover image: © Getty Images Eighth edition published 2024 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 Taylor & Francis The right of Annika Marlen Hinze and James M. Smith to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Every effort has been made to contact copyright-holders. Please advise the publisher of any errors or omissions, and these will be corrected in subsequent editions. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. First edition published by Pearson Education, Inc. 2006 Seventh edition published by Routledge 2013 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Hinze, Annika Marlen, editor. Title: American urban politics in a global age / edited by Annika Marlen Hinze and James M. Smith. Description: Eighth edition. | New York: Routledge, 2024. | “First edition published by Pearson Education, Inc. 2006. Seventh edition published by Routledge 2013.”—Copyright page. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023034869 (print) | LCCN 2023034870 (ebook) | ISBN 9781138059368 (hbk) | ISBN 9781138059375 (pbk) | ISBN 9781315163635 (ebk) Subjects: LCSH: Urban policy—United States. | Municipal government— United States. | Metropolitan government—United States. Classification: LCC HT123 .A6664 2024 (print) | LCC HT123 (ebook) | DDC 320.8/50973—dc23/eng/20230831 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023034869 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023034870 ISBN: 978-1-138-05936-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-138-05937-5 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-16363-5 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781315163635 Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

CONTENTS Prefaceix Editors’ Introductory Essay

xi

PART I  GOVERNANCE AND POLITICAL ECONOMY   1

The Pillars of American Urban Scholarship in a Global Age Editors’ Introduction SELECTION 1   All Politics is Local: The Reemergence of the Study of City Politics Jessica Trounstine SELECTION 2  The Interests of the Limited City

3 3 6 19

Paul E. Peterson SELECTION 3  The Future of Urban Regime Studies

32

Clarence N. Stone SELECTION 4  Why History (Still) Matters: Time and Temporality in Urban Political Analysis

52

Joel Rast

 2 The Politics of Urban Economic Development in a New Era Editors’ Introduction SELECTION 5  Techs and the Cities: A New Economic Development Paradigm? Gary Sands, Pierre Filion and Laura A. Reese

79 79 82

v

vi  Contents SELECTION 6   Can Politicians Bargain with Business?

101

Paul Kantor and H. V. Savitch SELECTION 7   “Re-Stating” Theories of Urban Development 118 James M. Smith

 3 Public Power and Private Influence in Contemporary Cities Editors’ Introduction SELECTION 8  The Mauling of Public Space Margaret Kohn SELECTION 9   Beyond Community and Sharing: The Case of Airbnb in New York City

145 145 148

168

Katharina Knaus and Peer Illner SELECTION 10  What Are Charter Schools and Do They Deliver?

184

Jon Valant

PART II THE CHALLENGES OF GOVERNING THE DIVIDED METROPOLIS  4 Governing Factional Polities in America’s Urban Centers

193 193 SELECTION 11   Immigrants and Politics in San Francisco 196 Els de Graauw Editors’ Introduction

SELECTION 12  White Power, Black Brokers

219

Mary Pattillo SELECTION 13   A Descriptive Analysis of Female Mayors: The U.S. and T   exas in Comparative Perspective 239 Melissa Marschall

 5 Urban Resilience, Sustainability, and Climate Change Editors’ Introduction SELECTION 14   Is Detroit Dead? Peter Eisinger

257 257 262

Contents  vii

SELECTION 15   Do-It-Yourself Cities

278

Kimberley Kinder SELECTION 16   Air Conditioning Will Not Save Us

294

Eric Dean Wilson SELECTION 17   A Battle Between a Great City and a Great Lake: The Climate Crisis Haunts Chicago’s Future

300

Dan Egan SELECTION 18   Civil Society and Sustainable Cities

311

Kent E. Portney and Jeffrey Berry

 6 Governance, Gentrification, and Neighborhoods Editors’ Introduction SELECTION 19  What Is Wrong with Gentrification?

333 333 334

Margaret Kohn SELECTION 20   Gentrifier? Who, Me? Interrogating the Gentrifier in the Mirror

350

John Joe Schlichtman and Jason Patch

PART III  CRISES AND WAYS FORWARD  7 The Year 2020 and Its Aftermath Editors’ Introduction SELECTION 21  The Epicenter

373 373 376

Dan Barry, Annie Correal and Todd Heisler SELECTION 22   Structurally Vulnerable Neighborhood Environments and Racial/Ethnic COVID-19 Inequities

395

Rachel L. Berkowitz, Xing Gao, Eli K. Michaels and Mahasin S. Mujahid SELECTION 23   COVID-19 Cases in New York City, a Neighborhood-Level Analysis The Stoop, NYU Furman Center Blog

401

viii  Contents SELECTION 24  Where Do Black Lives Matter? Race, Stigma, and Place in Milwaukee, Wisconsin

407

Jenna M. Loyd and Anne Bonds

 8 Cities in Control? Finding Solutions to Broad Issues Editors’ Introduction

426 426

SELECTION 25   5 Ways Cities Led in Pandemic Recovery430 Lindsey Volz SELECTION 26   New Data Reveal Most Populous Cities Experienced Some of the Largest Decreases

434

Amel Toukabri and Crystal Delbé SELECTION 27   Big Cities Aren’t Dividing America. They Hold the Key to Our Collective Future

442

Amy Liu and Alan Berube SELECTION 28   If Mayors Ruled the World: Why They Should and How they Already Do

446

Benjamin R. Barber

Index467

PREFACE The eighth edition of American Urban Politics in a Global Age comes at a time of great upheaval in cities and in the debates surrounding them. Perhaps fittingly, it also features some editorial turnover at this great moment of change: Paul Kantor and Dennis R. Judd, trailblazers in American urban politics research, have, with this eighth edition, passed the baton to us as new editors! We had put together a full selection of readings for this eighth (and our first!) edition as co-editors in 2019—and then the world changed overnight! The COVID-19 pandemic profoundly impacted the debate about cities, and many Americans’ perceptions of their livability. Crowded places, the public discourse insisted, represented dangerous incubators of infection with this new virus, which has held the world hostage for three years now. Of course, this kind of thinking was also infused with partisan thinking about cities and represented, for many political pundits, a strategy to further ostracize cities as viable places of American life. Since the initial pandemic-related shutdowns of our cities, there is plenty of research to demonstrate that dense living conditions are not correlated with higher risks of COVID infections. In one early study, which we have published in this edition, the Furman Center at NYU cross-references data on COVID infections in NYC with several other factors, such as housing density, public transit use, median household income, race and ethnicity, and housing conditions. The researchers show convincingly that even in the early and devastating COVID-19 outbreak in New York City, its most densely populated neighborhoods in Manhattan had lower COVID infection rates than many less dense neighborhoods in the outer boroughs. The reason for this, they show, is simple: housing insecurity, overcrowding, and unsafe working conditions were the main risk factors for COVID infections and deaths, not riding the train or living in Manhattan’s dense apartment buildings. This finding has important implications for the social impact of pandemic outbreaks: we are not “all together” in this. Certain population groups— those with less resources, less access to healthcare, less ability to work from home and socially distance, who live in less healthy neighborhoods and

ix

x  Preface overcrowded apartments—are the most vulnerable. In the United States, communities of color, many immigrants, and low-income communities were disproportionately affected by the pandemic—a glaring sign that we have not overcome many of our social issues, and that some, in fact, have gotten worse over the last decade! Our reworked selection of readings for this eighth edition is an attempt to reflect many of the issues that the year 2020 shed new light on—some of these are new issues, like the challenge of dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic, but others, which the pandemic has put a renewed emphasis on, are not really new issues at all: social inequality, poverty, racism, and xenophobia are as old as urban life in this country. And yet, the year 2020 shined a cruel light on them as the pandemic, but also (as so many times before!) violence against people of color took their toll. It was a devastating year that should be, in many ways, a wake-up call for policymakers and researchers that changes need to be made. The selections featured in this book are intended to reflect the new and old challenges of the year 2020 and beyond and present some thoughts on how to address them. We know we have big shoes to fill—both Paul Kantor and Dennis R. Judd have been mentors and inspiration to us as scholars. We thank them for entrusting us with carrying forth this book and hope to do justice to their scholarly legacy. We would also like to profoundly thank our editor at Routledge, Emily Ross, as well as Hannah Rich, for their patience and their valuable input regarding this book and the rather meticulous permissions process. Finally, we would like to thank our respective spouses, Greg Holyk (Annika Hinze) and Caitlin Smith (James Smith) for all their love and support, and for always having our backs. We dedicate this book to our respective daughters, Mila and Esra, the next generation of urban dwellers. Annika Marlen Hinze James M. Smith January 2023

EDITORS’ INTRODUCTORY ESSAY Welcome to a New Age! Over the past few decades, scholars and students of urban politics have been discussing the impact of globalization on the changing role of cities within their national contexts and the world at large. In the United States, as in other national settings, the rise of a global economy and culture has had a direct and significant impact on cities’ governance, and the lived experiences of their residents. One need not look far for examples—nearly every facet of urban governance and life has been impacted by such global changes. For instance, where urban governance was once thought of as mostly a local endeavor (with the exception of state government regulations or federal funding), today’s urban leaders must work with actors from across the globe to secure new economic investment and growth within their city limits. Chicago’s former mayor Rahm Emanuel, for one, led trade delegations to China in 2013 and 2015 seeking new business opportunities for his city.1 When Amazon announced that it was looking for a place to locate its new headquarters (“HQ2”) in 2017, more than 200 cities across three countries (the United States, Mexico, and Canada) in North America applied as contenders, offering tax breaks and other amenities. Cities went to extraordinary lengths to make this bid palatable for Amazon owner, Jeff Bezos. The City of Tucson, Arizona famously gifted Bezos a giant, 21-foot saguaro cactus along with its bid for HQ2 (Amazon responded that it could not accept gifts and sent the cactus to the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum instead).2 And when global or multinational companies do decide to place a headquarters in a city, this draws new residents looking for new types of amenities. Long-time residents of U.S. cities thus witnessed their neighborhoods change in ways that might have seemed unfathomable in previous decades. This largely relates to the physical restructuring of cities

xi

xii   Editors’ Introductory Essay that has occurred as U.S. cities compete to become more “global,” but it can also be seen at the neighborhood level as processes of gentrification have restructured demographics and urban amenities. While global investment and economic growth are certainly prioritized by urban political actors, global ties mean that urban economies are more susceptible to broader global crises, which can create serious challenges to officials governing cities in this global era. With this transition to a more global metropolis in mind, we have structured the readings in this book to reflect the idea that politics, and the role of formal and informal institutions, should always be conceptualized as four-dimensional, taking into consideration the dynamics of time, and, along with it, incremental (and sometimes sudden) changes. The selections in this book (for this edition, as well as for previous editions) shine a light on the dimensions of urban politics that have undergone significant changes over the last decade, the last five decades, or the last century. Other changes can be sudden, and sometimes unexpected. The 2016 U.S. presidential election, the COVID-19 pandemic, the Movement for Black Lives, and the growing impact of climate change on our cities, for instance, represent cataclysmic events that have catapulted cities to the forefront of the federal political debate in many unexpected (and often deeply misrepresentative) ways: as struggling harbingers of drugs and crime, with a reference to “inner cities” that more closely resembles urban concepts and rhetoric of the 1980s than the complex metropolitan mosaics our cities have grown into over time. Or as new safe havens or “sanctuary cities” for the country’s 11.3 million undocumented immigrants, jump-starting local activists, and urban administrations into action. As epicenters of the global pandemic, and as the sufferers of climate change, cities have made the headlines as the centers of disaster, but they have also started to become the incubators for many solutions. It is too early to say with any certainty which role cities will occupy exactly throughout the 21st century, but it is important to recognize and reflect on these dynamics that are spurring changes that will affect the next decades. This eighth edition of American Urban Politics in a Global Age, like previous editions, is organized into three parts. Part I contains scholarly discussions on the dynamics of the urban political economy, and the role of urban governance in a global age. After introducing some of the classic readings on urban governance and urban economic development, the first part of this book explores the imperatives of economic growth, and their commensurability with urban prosperity. It also examines the growing role of private actors in the urban economy, the dynamics of public-private partnerships, and the implications of growing privatization for social policy, and democratic decision-making. Part II addresses the question of governance of increasingly diverse (ethnically, racially, economically) metropolitan regions, and the issues of equality (or lack thereof) that diversity and social

Editors’ Introductory Essay   xiii

polarization entail especially in the face of new challenges such as climate change. In these contexts, the selections attempt to cater to a variety of different challenges, such as questions of equal representation, based on ethnicity, race, and gender, as well as the persistence of segregation, based on income and race, and gender, and the resulting persistence of inequality across metro areas. The suburbs are also changing dramatically in composition. Poverty, for instance, is growing in suburbia. A Brookings Study found, for instance, that Atlanta’s suburban poor grew by 159% between 2000 and 2011.3 Furthermore, suburban municipalities, inexperienced in addressing this sort of challenge, often lack the institutional infrastructure of dealing with poverty. However, the fact that the suburbs are now confronting poverty doesn’t necessarily mean that poor neighborhoods in cities are disappearing. Both, cities and suburbs, tend to be growing more diverse, in terms of race, ethnicity, and income. This also creates inequality in the ways that different urban communities are able to address challenges, such as the consequences of climate change, which are impacting cities today. Wealthy communities have better resources to build resilience against the consequences of climate change than lower-income communities, leading to a further exacerbation of social inequalities within our cities. Part III addresses current and future challenges that cities experience. First and foremost, it addresses the aftermath of the cataclysmic year of 2020, and the lessons that can be drawn by urban communities, scholars, and policymakers. How did cities reinvent themselves in the aftermath of the COVID crisis? How have they addressed, over the last few decades, policing, housing equality, and education, especially when it comes to historically disadvantaged populations? How did their different positions and responses to the crisis pan out? And how are cities dealing with other challenges, in addition to financial crises and disinvestment, such as gentrification and neighborhood change, the advent of smart technology, and the new issues posed by climate change? The limits of policy and governance on the one hand, and new political arrangements on the other, determine how resilient America’s urban centers will be in the face of these complex challenges.

Part I: Governance and Political Economy In City Politics, Annika Marlen Hinze and Dennis R. Judd define city politics as the meeting place of public interests and private influence. From this perspective, and it is one that the readings in this text reflect as well, scholars cannot consider governance in U.S. cities without contemplating the consistent pressure of economic forces on urban policymakers’ decision-making. Urban policy decisions are often framed with officials asking: is this good for the local economy? This may seem obvious in the case of tax policy or zoning decisions, but it can also reach into seemingly unrelated areas such as education policy—

xiv   Editors’ Introductory Essay for example, how does the quality of schools in the city affect whether or not middle-class workers will choose to buy homes, and thus, pay property taxes, in the city? Will these same schools educate students in ways that will appeal to companies considering a headquarters or production facility in the city? Decisions in other policy areas can follow a similar logic, and thus the private and economic influence on public institutions is a constant feature of urban politics. For some observers of urban governance, in fact, the economic consideration is the only consideration—city officials should pursue outcomes that will increase the economic fortunes of their residents as this pursuit is the one that they have the most control over. Of course, this is one well-known argument presented by Paul Peterson in City Limits (see Selection 2 in this reader)—the “unitary interest” of urban governments is to grow economies in ways that will theoretically benefit a large swath of their population. This perspective presented a theoretical dilemma for scholars of urban politics: if economic growth was a unitary interest, wouldn’t city politics be a fairly straightforward exercise? Scholars developing a political-economy approach to urban politics, however, also stressed political agency as a factor in all local-level political decisions. Different cities, depending on their political and commercial backgrounds, would approach the question of the economy differently. Several pivotal studies explored this variation in urban political actors’ efforts to shape economic policy—several scholars included in this volume (in addition to Peterson) contributed to this field: Stone, Kantor and Savitch, and Strom, for example. The global character of the economy in contemporary cities, however, has complicated this picture further. While city governments’ control over land and space once meant that dictating economic decisions was the policy area in which they could exercise the most control, today the global economic forces that dictate market conditions mean that city officials may not exercise control to the extent they once did. But the focus on economic growth remains a key focus of city officials in these changing times. As many urban economies have aligned with the “global” sectors of finance, real estate, insurance, and tech, city governments have worked to accommodate such transitions as well as to shape it in their own interests. This has meant a significant physical restructuring of cities’ central areas, often times subsidized or financed by the public sector. Public policy has focused on making downtowns friendlier to global travelers (business and leisure travelers alike), workers in the new urban economy, and residents settling in cities’ central areas and nearby neighborhoods. On the one hand, this means creating policy that keeps a city competitive with other cities trying to lure the same residents, tourists, and companies. On the other, it means pursuing large-scale development projects aimed at growing a city’s economic, and in some cases, global, reputation.

Editors’ Introductory Essay   xv

Among these projects, cities have focused on building entertainment districts, sports stadiums, convention centers, and other amenities (for example, the High Line in Manhattan). Public spending on projects in this realm has escalated over the past decade. Most new professional sports stadiums built since 2005 have approached $1 billion, and others have surpassed that mark. State and local governments are very willing to issue public bonds, with taxpayers on the line, for these development projects. The new Yankee Stadium for the Major League Baseball team in the Bronx, around half of which was publicly funded, opened in 2009, at an estimated cost of $2.3 billion.4 And in 2012, the state of Minnesota took on its “largest public works project” in its history—a new $1.1 billion stadium for the hometown NFL team, the Vikings,5 with around $500 million of the funding coming from the state of Minnesota.6 More recently, the NFL’s Oakland Raiders announced a move to Las Vegas that would include moving into a new stadium with an estimated (although not final) $1.9 billion cost.7 Such massive levels of public spending on stadia that are used only a handful of times per year are controversial, yet cities continue to see such spending as mandatory if they wish to remain competitive in a global marketplace. Like most capital in cities, sports franchises are mobile, and they threaten to leave if team ownership feels that a city government is not willing to meet the franchise’s expectations regarding stadium construction or renovation. Even in cases in which teams leave cities, decisions to fund stadium expenses can leave an unwanted legacy—when the St. Louis Rams football team left its Midwestern domed stadium for the greener pastures of Los Angeles, St. Louis and Missouri taxpayers learned they would be paying down debt on the Edward Jones dome until 2021.8 Public financing is also common in the construction and expansion of convention. Here again, private influence is critical in the decision-making process. Private consultants from global firms are key players in cities’ decisions to build more convention space—and convention-related amenities such as attached hotels and entertainment districts. Giving the same advice to cities across the globe, consultants suggest that the failure to build more space will result in a lost share of the convention business that so many cities depend upon. Much of the scholarship on these investments argues that more spending on convention center expansion does not necessarily result in more convention space being booked by trade shows, rendering such public investment questionable.9 Convention centers and sports stadiums may seem like specific examples, but they are a very direct example of public spending on amenities primarily used by the private sector. And with the high level of public investment, they also explicitly demonstrate the relationship between politics and economy in contemporary cities vying for global capital investment.

xvi   Editors’ Introductory Essay Another facet of such developments is the fact that new forms of governance are often developed to pursue these expensive megaprojects. In the United States, the federal government was a reliable partner for large urban projects in cities during the mid-20th century, providing funding opportunities for large-scale development policy that was intertwined with urban economies. The 21st century has not featured such a reliable fiscal partner for large U.S. cities. This leads to institutional innovation among mayors and other urban officials in finding ways to fund the economic development projects so critical to urban growth. In some cases, this may mean working with state governments or other cities in a region to create special-purpose authorities tasked with achieving development goals. In others, it means creating new types of institutions of governance to manage and finance development projects. In Chicago, for example, the city created an Infrastructure Bank to finance projects using private capital. In many cities, business improvement districts (BIDs) have also been used in this capacity. While these approaches help city officials to close a funding gap, or finish projects that would not be completed otherwise, it also raises questions regarding public accountability. As more development projects move outside the scope of general-purpose municipal governments, is the democratic principle of local governance sacrificed? Proponents of such approaches suggest that the increased capacity and efficiency of these institutions fulfill obligations to the public in a different sense. And urban policymakers, often under fiscal strain, are eager to find new methods for funding projects they feel must be pursued. The emphasis on economic policy has clearly maintained, if not reached new levels in this global era. Competition for private sector investment and jobs is more intense, the public subsidies that city governments commit to projects are increasing, and official responses to confront economic challenges take institutional forms that may reshape city governance for the foreseeable future. And while the physical effects of publicly-funded redevelopment may bring glitzy new features to central areas, questions remain regarding the benefits to the taxpayers and residents of cities.

Part II: The Challenges of Governing the Divided Metropolis In the context of the latter half of the 20th century, we came to think about state and local government as holdouts to federal reform. Especially during the Civil Rights Era, “states’ rights” became a slogan associated with the South’s upholding of Jim Crow, and its staunch resistance to racial integration. During the Great Party Realignment, which started with the Goldwater campaign’s attempt to capture the traditionally Democratic South for the Republicans in 1964, the Republican Party began to absorb this slogan, which

Editors’ Introductory Essay   xvii

lasted into the 21st century, and throughout the two terms of the Obama presidency. During the Trump presidency and the COVID-19 pandemic, the old definition of “states’ rights” seemed to have shifted in meaning. Suddenly, it was the traditionally “blue” states that seemed to resist lax COVID policies and anti-environmental policies that came from the White House during that time. Sanctuary cities saw themselves threatened with severe financial consequences of resisting the Trump administration’s harsh anti-immigrant policies, when the Trump White House threatened to withdraw federal grants, especially those supporting law enforcement from those jurisdictions. In the wake of the 2020 protests supporting the Movement for Black Lives, and condemning police violence against Black Americans in many American cities, the Trump administration further threatened cities: in September 2020, the Justice Department declared New York City, Portland, and Seattle so-called “anarchist jurisdictions” or “jurisdictions permitting violence and destruction of property” further threatening the withdrawal of federal funds from these cities.10 The Biden Justice Department withdrew the guidance and designations on February 25, 2021, a month after taking office. This illustrates that state and local governments have not always been resisting change. They have also been incubators of change and progress. Cities, in particular, have been the microcosms of human interaction, clashes, protest, and, eventually progress, since the industrial era. The Labor Movement pushed for workers’ rights throughout the great industrial cities of the Rustbelt. Immigrants started to flood into cities during the 19th century, adding a level of diversity to America’s great cities that was hitherto unknown. This did not immediately bring about more tolerance and openness. Reactionary politics, in an attempt to reign in the immigrant vote, and the chance at democratic representation for immigrant minorities, became visible in cities, when reformers attempted to implement literacy requirements, or property ownership as preconditions for individual access to the ballot booth. Political machines tried to capitalize on the vulnerable immigrant working class by buying votes for petty favors without any ambitions of ever implementing lasting social reforms. Prohibitionists launched successful campaigns associating Catholic immigrants with loose morals, prostitution, and alcoholism, turning the prohibitionist movement into a xenophobic campaign against the non-Anglo urban immigrant working class. But as hotbeds of such conflict, cities have always also been the bulwarks of reform. In 1890, Jacob Rijs’ revolutionary utilization of flash photography led to his photojournalistic publication How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York, which provided real-life photographic insights into the daily lives of the urban working class, fostering, for the first time, wide-ranging awareness of the horrid living conditions of the industrial working poor. In many ways, the role of cities as laboratories for reform has become amplified in the current political and social climate, resembling most closely

xviii   Editors’ Introductory Essay the 1920s, when immigration to the United States hit a fever pitch, spurring a strong reactionary movement, and, ultimately, the passing through Congress of one of the most restrictionist immigration acts in American history, the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924. History does not quite repeat itself, and there are likely as many differences as there are similarities between the political climate roughly 100 years ago, and today. However, cities are once again finding themselves in the midst of an immigration debate, and a restrictive backlash against the changes in racial and ethnic composition that the nation is currently undergoing. By 2050, as projected by the Pew Research Center in 2008, white people will be in the minority in the United States, with their proportion of the total U.S. population shrinking from 67% in 2005 to 47% in 2050.11 While whites will still be the largest minority group in the country (followed by 29% Hispanic, 13% Black, and 9% Asian), they will be a minority among minorities. These patterns very much resemble the ethnic composition of many urban areas today, where no ethnic or racial group makes up a clear majority. These prospects, along with a tense debate about the 11.3 million undocumented immigrants currently in the country has sparked a restrictionist backlash at the federal level and once again put cities at the forefront of reform. The sanctuary city movement is a movement of cities to protect undocumented immigrants from the threat of deportation. State and local governments do not have the legislative power to create their own immigration law—only the federal government is authorized to do so. Therefore, sanctuary cities cannot completely shield undocumented immigrants from deportation. They can, however, implement certain protections, such as not supporting any collaboration between the local police force and ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a federal entity). They can provide local ID cards for undocumented immigrants, allowing them to obtain an ID without having to present immigration documents, as they do in order to obtain a state ID. Cities and municipalities can also allow undocumented immigrants access to certain social services, such as basic health services, for instance, without having to show proof of legal immigration status. Under the Bush and Obama administrations, there was no serious pushback from the federal government against the sanctuary movement. The Trump administration, however, at least rhetorically threatened to redirect federal funding (which is mostly allocated to the states, and not directly to cities and municipalities) away from sanctuary cities, as a punishment for their resistance to federal immigration enforcement. Increasingly, not only cities are affected by the presence of a large number of undocumented immigrants having to fear for their deportation: As suburbs are becoming more diverse mosaics of income status and ethnic and racial composition, many immigrants (and especially the undocumented working class) bypass cities altogether and move directly to the suburbs. In the suburbs, poor immigrants, like any other poor demographics, have less access

Editors’ Introductory Essay   xix

to services, such as public transportation, and are less likely to be shielded from immigration enforcement. But it is not just the poor, who are moving to suburbia. Middle class minority groups (immigrant and native born) are also moving to the suburbs, which increasingly resemble big cities in their ethnic and racial composition. The politics of race and gender remain equally contested in the current political climate. Since the last election, the concept that we may have entered a post-racial era of politics (which was not a particularly sound concept to begin with) has been abandoned. During the summer of 2017, the nation bore witness to white supremacists carrying torches and chanting hateful slogans while marching through the heart of Charlottesville, VA, a quaint university town with a sizable minority population. Violent protests erupted over the course of that August weekend, leaving one young woman dead—killed by a white supremacist racing his vehicle into a crowd of counter-protesters at full speed—and many others injured. Besides the visible resurgence of a white supremacist movement in the United States, which is hostile not only to African Americans, but also to Jews, Muslims, and Hispanics, among others, it is increasingly clear that across American metropolitan regions, minorities still live in race and income segregation. Fear of the other remains prevalent across America’s metropolitan mosaics, and today it manifests itself in the increasing fortification of wealth and identity in privatized enclaves, equipped with double-doors, high fences, sophisticated security systems, and cameras, so as to deter or discover any intruder who does not belong. Entertainment and work places, at the same time, have become fortified as well, allowing tourists and the wealthy to commute from one bubble to the next, minimizing their contact with the outside world.

Part III: Crisis and Ways Forward The Urban Crisis comes in many forms these days. Gone are the days when we were addressing the urban crisis merely in the shape of post-industrial urban decline, and inner-city poverty and crime. Many urban areas have recovered from their post-industrial slump. Neighborhoods are revitalizing, housing prices are getting steeper, the quality of life is improving to an extent that many urban areas are once again much-coveted places to live in. Has urban recovery sparked a Great Inversion, in which the poor residents of gentrifying urban neighborhoods are being pushed out to the older, first-ring suburbs by a sharp increase in housing prices and the urban cost of living? Will suburbs turn into the struggling, high-poverty areas, which used to be our “inner cities” in the 1970s and 1980s? If there is such a movement, it is most likely incomplete. Paul Jargowsky, a professor of public policy at Rutgers University, for instance, who is interested in the concentration of poverty in urban areas,

xx   Editors’ Introductory Essay has found that poverty in American metros has reconcentrated since the early 2000s, but that it also has declustered.12 So, instead of concentrating in the “inner cities,” deep-seated pockets of poverty, particularly in large metropolitan regions are more widely distributed across the area, creating an income-based metropolitan mosaic, where deep poverty is interspersed with areas of tremendous wealth. This adds complexity to the understanding of the distribution of poverty in American metro areas today. Despite the fact that high poverty areas persist in cities and, in fact, exhibit more deeply seated poverty concentration than at the turn of the century, some urban neighborhoods are also undergoing a “renaissance,” and, along with it, a certain level of gentrification. It is difficult to conceptualize gentrification in a straight-forward fashion, because there are so many different aspects to the issue. Gentrification can improve the quality of the neighborhood and neighborhood infrastructure. It can make life in a neighborhood more pleasant, as food and entertainment desserts, as well as empty lots disappear, and houses are carefully rehabbed. At the same time, displacement looms large for low-income residents, as property values, rents, and, along with this, the cost of living increase. Is there a middle road? Can and should urban administrations mediate the effects of gentrification on low-income residents? Neighborhood revitalization is by no means an initiative that comes from the private sector only. Often, local and state governments pave the way for powerful private actors to partake in large-scale urban development projects, which are said to improve the neighborhood and provide an incentive for even more investment. Neighborhood residents are not always thrilled about these sorts of projects and sometimes make their opposition heard, although, while such opposition is noted, it mostly does not change the outcome. Urban megaprojects, such as Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn, New York, for instance, which has recently rebranded itself by abandoning its former name and renaming itself Pacific Park, are often controversial from the outset, not only due to their potential impact on the neighborhood but also because they are placed on densely developed urban land, meaning that existing structures will have to be torn down, and businesses and residents will be displaced. It remains to be seen what sort of long-term impact Pacific Park will have on the surrounding neighborhoods of Fort Greene, Prospect Heights, and Downtown Brooklyn. Its short-term effects have, to be sure, been mixed. The environmental impact, due to faulty wastewater management, as well as the aggressive use of eminent domain to clear the footprint, has been criticized by the community and beyond. Yet, urban megaprojects are certainly a future force to be reckoned with, and urban administrations tend to be fond of them, due to their revenue generating powers. Urban revitalization in the United States at-large remains uneven, however. While some metros, such as Chicago or Pittsburgh, have successfully adapted

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from a manufacturing to a service economy, by attracting international capital and company headquarters, others, such as Detroit and Cleveland still struggle with population loss and disinvestment. Yet, downtown Detroit has seen the influx of young creatives, who are attracted by its urban lofts and low cost of housing. Can the Creative Class save struggling cities? Should cities adapt by catering to a class of college-educated 20- and 30 somethings with expertise in the creative industries, from web design to marketing, from street to computer programming? The widely popular concept of “smart cities” advertises a technological revolution akin to the creative energy of Richard Florida’s coveted Creative Class. In the popular imagination, smart cities feature self-driving, environmentally sustainable cars, “smart homes,” which minimize one’s energy consumption through smart sensors and simple voice communication. In reality, however, this privately funded technology— which nevertheless relies on an existing energy and infrastructure grid at least partially funded by the public sector—can only remain viable as long as private investors can make a profit. If smart services cease to financially viable, private corporations could simply abandon them—or make it worth their while through uncontrolled data mining and consumer surveillance. To the layperson, this is technologically uncontrollable and legally unregulated territory—at least in part, which makes it extremely difficult to predict the future of smart technology. One thing remains certain, however: smart technology does not always only benefit the consumer, and it is by no means always constant or synonymous with “green” or “sustainable” technology, despite the fact that both terms are quite often used interchangeably. Can cities and metros attract financial investment and an educated “brain capital” without neglecting traditional working-class residents, who are struggling? This question has no easy answer. But the fact remains that cities will have to attract both educated creative types, as well as capital investment, and at the same time, remain socially conscious. This has been a challenge for cities since time immortal, and even though the urban condition is constantly changing, cities have managed to do all those things, for the most part, over the centuries. As we move into a new political and technological era, new questions about urban governance are surfacing. Cities have never been spoiled by federal policy and money, but they have benefitted from increased social spending at the federal level. Shortly after his inauguration, in February 2009, President Obama created the White House Office of Urban Affairs via executive order, in an attempt to increase the federal government’s commitment to cities and metros. While this was deemed an important gesture by a president, it did not change much for federal-municipal relations. In 2017, President Trump repeatedly painted cities in a very negative light, as harbingers of drugs and crime, and as unmotivated to “clean up their act.” The COVID-19 pandemic provided an opening for the former president to

xxii   Editors’ Introductory Essay lean further into his hostile rhetoric: the pandemic laid bare many of the persistent inequalities in cities in a particularly cruel light. Unfortunately, it also opened the door for cities to become political pawns in an increasingly polarized political debate where everything, from public health issues to immigration, to race, and social issues, is on the table. Republicans used the pandemic to demonize cities as dying incubators of dangerous diseases and havens of crime and economic decline. They conveniently ignored the fact that poverty and unsafe housing, not urban density, were the biggest risk factors for contracting COVID early on in the pandemic. Poverty and unsafe housing are issues that are prevalent throughout the country—they are not phenomena specific to cities. But as social polarization in cities is increasing, so is poverty, and cities, like any other place throughout the country, will have to find ways to address this issue in the absence of better federal policies. The Biden administration thus far has not addressed cities specifically. The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, one of the administration’s biggest accomplishments thus far, will certainly benefit cities. But it will not be able to address the deeper social inequalities that underlie urban (and rural!) life in the United States. Cities are sites of the greatest social and economic inequalities; they are the most damaging emitters of greenhouse gasses, and showcases of many other social, economic, and environmental issues. But they have great potential to be at the forefront of providing solutions to these issues as well. With smart infrastructure, better social policy, and meaningful social interactions across racial, economic, ethnic, social, and other societal diving lines, cities could provide answers to many persistent problems across nationstates and the world. Whether they will get the attention, resources, and policies to make this happen remains an open question. Annika Marlen Hinze James M. Smith January 2023

Notes   1

Bergen, Kathy. 2015. “Chicago delegation heads back to China in continued pursuit of economic ties.” Chicago Tribune, July 13. http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ globalcity/ct-china-trip-met-20150713-story.html  2 The Arizona Daily Star. 2017. “Amazon re-gifts Tucson’s giant cactus.” September 19. https://tucson.com/news/local/amazon-re-gifts-tucsons-giant-cactus/ article_79d78660-9d78-11e7-aada-ebfc43a5ccea.html   3 Kneebone, Elizabeth and Alan Berube (2013): Confronting Suburban Poverty in America. Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution.  4 Povich, Elaine S. 2016. “Why should public money be used to build sports stadiums?” PBS News Hour, July 13.

Editors’ Introductory Essay   xxiii

 5 Grumney, Ray, Eddie Thomas, Mark Boswell, and Jim Foster. (2017) “Now appearing on the horizon.” Minneapolis Star Tribune, N.D., accessed April 5, 2017. http://www.startribune.com/what-it-took-to-build-u-s-bank-stadium/383837311/   6 Platt, Adam. 2016. “Is U.S. Bank Stadium worth it? A look at the numbers behind the Vikings’ $1.1 billion home.” MinnPost, August 26. https://www.minnpost.com/ twin-cities-business/2016/08/us-bank-stadium-worth-it-look-numbers-behindvikings-11-billion-home   7 Velotta, Richard N. 2017. Exact cost of Raiders’ Las Vegas stadium still unknown.” Las Vegas Review Journal, June 12. https://www.reviewjournal.com/business/ stadium/exact-cost-of-raiders-las-vegas-stadium-still-unknown/   8 Respaut, Robin. 2016. “With NFL Rams gone, St. Louis still stuck with stadium debt.” Reuters, February 3. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-sports-nfl-stadiums-insight/ with-nfl-rams-gone-st-louis-still-stuck-with-stadium-debt-idUSKCN0VC0EP  9 For example, see Heywood Sanders (2005), “Space available: the realities of convention centers as economic development strategy.” The Brookings Institution Research Brief (January 1). Accessed online. 10 Department of Justice. 2020. “Department of Justice identifies New York City, Portland and Seattle as jurisdictions permitting violence and destruction of property.” Released Monday, September 21. https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/ department-justice-identifies-new-york-city-portland-and-seattle-jurisdictionspermitting 11 Passel, Jeffrey S. and D’Vera Cohn (2008): “U.S. Population Projections: 20052050.” The Pew Research Center, Hispanic Trends. Accessed online. 12 Jargowsky, Paul (2013): “Concentration of poverty in the new millennium: Changes in the prevalence, composition, and location of high-poverty neighborhoods.” The Century Foundation & Rutgers Center for Urban Research and Education.

PART I Governance and Political Economy

CHAPTER 1 The Pillars of American Urban Scholarship in a Global Age Editors’ Introduction How should we approach the study of urban politics? Is urban politics its own area of study, apart from state and federal politics? Are cities special creatures, or “strange animals,” which require their own conceptual framework, and a specific methodological approach? How much power do cities have to determine their own destinies? How do the private and informal sectors figure into urban politics? This first chapter combines what we see as the foundational readings in urban politics. Here, urban scholars attempt to answer fundamental questions about how to approach the urban and local levels academically. Jessica Trounstine, in the first selection, argues that local politics figures prominently and importantly in the political science literature. She makes the case that we can hardly understand a national political system (in particular one so federalized and fragmented as the one in the United States) without understanding politics at the local level. She notes that while urban and local politics is certainly unique, following a logic, rules, and constraints very different from the national and state level, the local level is nevertheless crucially important for a holistic understanding of American political processes. Trounstine advocates for a more assertive incorporation of the study of urban and local politics into political science as a whole, and more data-driven research at the local level, so as to create a more complete understanding of the American political system. Doing so, she argues, could expand extant theoretical and conceptual understandings of American politics, as well as political science as a whole. DOI: 10.4324/9781315163635-23

4  PART I    Governance and Political Economy On the uniqueness of the urban and local political framework, Paul E. Peterson, in Selection 2, notes that cities, because of their limited political powers, have to rely on strong economic growth policies, whether they like it or not. A healthy urban economy, Peterson argues, incurs greater tax revenues, which are their main source of income. This, in turn, results in better service infrastructure, which can also have a strong positive impact on social and cultural life in the city. Cities do not have the same regulatory powers as the federal government, or even state legislatures. Therefore, they cannot regulate the import and export of goods, services, and people. They have no say in how federal resources are distributed, either. And, despite a renewed and important discourse on the role of Sanctuary Cities in providing certain services to undocumented immigrants, cities (or states, for that matter, though some have certainly tried) cannot determine their own immigration policy. Due to their limited decision-making powers, cities must capitalize on the one resource they have—land—and compete with one another for capital investment. Peterson’s argument, at its base, therefore advocates for City Hall to focus its efforts primarily on keeping business interests in the city. This would mean keeping taxes and business regulations low, investing in business subsidies, and staying away from social services with big price tags. A controversial book even at the time of its publication, the pro-business 1980s, Peterson’s argument has remained controversial among urban scholars to this day, due to its assumption that the benefits of urban economic growth would “trickle down” to an entire population. While Peterson’s argument about the limitations of cities in determining their own destinies is an important one, most mayors, depending on the specific demographics and needs of their constituencies, cannot and will not prioritize economic growth over providing key services that cater to the basic needs of their constituencies. In most cities throughout the United States, mayors have to engage in a careful balancing act between attracting businesses and revenue on the one hand, and taking care of the needs of all their residents, on the other. Clarence Stone’s Regime Politics addresses this careful balancing act. In Selection 3, Stone lays out the logic of his major theoretical contribution to the urban politics literature, developed based on his case study of post-war Atlanta, but applicable to any city throughout the United States. Urban regimes denote the powerful coalitions between cities’ mayors and the downtown business elites. Stone focused specifically on the informality of the partnership between the two, noting that while the study of formal urban institutions was important, untangling the dynamics of informal coalition-building within cities was crucial to an understanding of the urban political process. Mayors are limited, as Peterson pointed out, by their lack of independent resources, and their dependence on revenue through business, and therefore had a strong interest in coalescing with downtown

CHAPTER 1   The Pillars of American Urban Scholarship in a Global Age   5

business elites. Business elites, on the other hand, relied on City Hall to use its decision-making powers and its capabilities of resource allocation, in order to prevent the decline of the central business district—a very serious threat during the decades of urban decline, the 1960s through 1980s. Stone explains how, by means of their informal arrangements, these two powerful entities could compromise to “get things done” in a way neither one of them was capable of independently. What is particularly interesting about Stone’s sensitive case study, is the incorporation of racial and ethnic politics. Under Atlanta’s regime politics, the city’s influential Black middle class was offered significant benefits by City Hall and the downtown business community, recognizing the need to cater to other segments of the urban population besides the business sector alone. In modern day politics, of course, things have changed considerably. Business interests have become increasingly flexible, fluid, and dynamic, and are no longer as physically tied to and invested in the central business district of any city in particular. If they do not find favorable conditions in one urban environment, they can just up and move to another. Demographics have changed as well: No longer do inner cities struggle with the kind of postindustrial decline they were facing during the second half of the 20th century. Clarence Stone has acknowledged these changes and called for revisions of and amendments to regime politics. In the second half of Selection 3, Stone introduces Urban Political Orders as a new concept for understanding the changed urban reality of the 21st century. These political orders symbolize a first step in understanding the multi-layered, more fluid coalitions pervasive in urban politics today. He notes that The multitiered conception of a city’s political order thus does not carry with it an assumption that position within this order is locked into place, a conclusion that might follow from structural determinism. Instead, the logic employed here is that as adjustments to an ongoing process of change are made, a capacity to act can be strengthened or weakened.

In Selection 4, Joel Rast calls for a “historic turn” in urban politics to fill political gaps and understand urban political, institutional, and structural developments. Rast argues that only by observing urban politics as a longterm process, can we understand the occurrence of certain phenomena and outcomes at any given time. He also argues that an increased focus on temporal processes in the study of urban politics could link the field more closely to other important subfields in the discipline. This is particularly important, since many urban scholars feel that the field of urban and local politics has been relegated to the margins of political science, and is often dismissed as lacking a sound research methodology, beyond mere “storytelling.”

6  PART I    Governance and Political Economy Looking beyond existing frameworks and concepts will also significantly determine the future of the field. Interdisciplinary approaches are increasingly important to understand the complexity of developments within the urban framework. Historical analysis, as Rast suggests, is certainly one major building bloc that can reconnect urban politics to other areas within the discipline. Analytical tools beyond the traditional political science toolkit may be an additional way of situating urban and local politics firmly within the social sciences, and understanding its larger processes and complex developments in a more holistic fashion.

1 All Politics is Local: The Reemergence of the Study of City Politics Jessica Trounstine * In the preface to his ground-breaking City Limits, Paul Peterson declared that “urban political analysis has been once again to the periphery of the discipline.”1 At the time Peterson wrote, many political scientists could recall a not-too-distant past when urban scholars and their work represented mainstream political science. Peterson expressed hope that it would “be possible for the urbanists of the eighties to address the central concerns of political life with the vigor and conviction with which it was possible to address them two decades earlier.” Nearly 25 years later, Dennis Judd evaluated the field’s success in this endeavor in a 2005 Urban Affairs Review article. Judd disappointingly concluded that “urban politics has continued to occupy an uncomfortable space at the margins of the discipline.”2 Its status remains the same in 2009. Some urban scholars suggest that the field’s disconnection from mainstream political science is a good thing, allowing urbanists the freedom to pursue more meaningful questions and nuanced answers.3 But other scholars, intent on rectifying the field’s peripheral position, have proposed a variety of reasons for their maligned status. Perhaps most importantly for explaining the ghettoization of the field is the failure of many urban scholars to connect their questions and findings to more general political science * Jessica Trounstine, ‘All Politics is Local: The Reemergence of the Study of City Politics’, Perspectives on Politics, 7.3, pp. 611–618, reproduced with permission of Cambridge University Press.

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phenomena or to utilize theoretical developments from mainstream political science.4 Scholars like Harold Gosnell, Robert Dahl, Edward Banfield, James Wilson, and Theodore Lowi once successfully engaged the broader political science community through their city politics research; today a great deal of urban politics work focuses on debates that are simply not central to the wider discipline. Another reason that urban politics remains estranged is a lack of attention to social scientific methods. Over the last half-decade, political science moved towards a more quantitative discipline while the field of urban politics remained largely qualitatively oriented and focused on single cases. In part as a result of this methodological approach, many scholars have been unable (or unwilling) to adequately address counterclaims and alternative explanations in their work.5 Worse, as Judd argues, some urban politics scholarship can be characterized as ideologically intolerant, hyperbolic, and overly normative.6 A final reason that urban politics has become less central to political science is that cities themselves no longer seem as important to political life. Political affairs and media attention have become increasingly nationalized and there is no widespread sense of an impending “urban crisis.” Today most of the population resides outside of the central city and many cities look demographically and politically distinct from the nation as a whole.7 Furthermore, some political science scholars have come to believe that no important or interesting politics happens in cities—the federal system severely constrains city decision making; whatever freedom cities are granted by states and the national government is hampered by the drive to compete for development and population with other localities; turnout is shockingly low as are interest and knowledge of local politics; and numerically speaking individual local policy decisions affect an insignificant number of people relative to state or national policies. Although each of these explanations probably has some truth to it, I do not attempt to adjudicate among these propositions. Instead I lay out a rationale for studying local government from a number of different perspectives. Scholars of city politics have offered political science an enormous amount of insightful and careful work. But the reality is that today, many scholars are discouraged from studying the local level or are insufficiently trained in the local context to effectively use the data. It is quite possible to get an undergraduate degree (or a Ph.D.) from many political science programs without knowing the first thing about city politics. Indeed, many political science departments do not have a faculty member who is regularly engaged in research on local governments, nor is this viewed as a particular deficit. So I attempt here to persuade scholars (both established and emerging) of the value in studying what happens in America’s smallest political arenas.8

8  PART I    Governance and Political Economy Before doing so, I need to clarify what I mean by the study of local politics. I include in this category analysis of all sub-state units (e.g., cities, suburbs, rural areas, counties, school districts, etc.). While I use the terms “urban” and “city” throughout this essay, the term “local politics” is probably the most accurate. Further, I think of local politics as both a dependent and an independent variable. For instance one might study political behavior directed at local policy (city politics as an outcome) or alternatively analyze the effect of local institutions on political outcomes like presidential turnout (city politics as a causal force). Similarly, some local politics work analyzes the ways in which cities affect the world beyond their borders, while other work studies how the world outside of the city affects the development and practice of politics within city limits.9 So then, what makes these local factors worth studying? Fundamentally, local politics is similar to and different from politics at other levels of American government. For both reasons scholars should be concerned with reinserting the subfield into mainstream political science. Because politics in cities is at once distinctive and analogous to politics more generally, studying local politics can provide insights for scholars into the functioning of our political world. I offer three related arguments in support of these claims. First, the local level is the source of numerous political outcomes that matter because they represent a large proportion of political events in the United States. Second, there are methodological advantages to studying local politics. Finally, analyzing politics at the sub-state level can generate thoroughly different kinds of questions than a purely national-level focus and can offer quite different answers to questions that apply more generally. I address each of these arguments in turn.

Local Politics are American Politics Studying local politics ought to be integral to the study of political science both because local politics is, in and of itself, important and because local contexts shape state and national politics. In the United States a large proportion of political activity occurs at the sub-state level. The vast majority of elected officials are local legislators. In 1992, the most recent year that the Census Bureau collected data on local legislators, the Census counted 342,812 members of local governing boards representing 84,955 different local governmental units, compared to the federal level where there were 535 legislators serving in one governmental unit, and 7,382 state legislators in the 50 states.10 In many places local jurisdictions also hold elections more frequently than states or the federal government. This means that most elections in the United States are local elections, most campaigns are local campaigns, and in some cases, most votes are local votes.11 One implication of this structure is that understanding the quality and functioning of American democracy is impossible without attention to local elections and legislatures.12

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Local decisions and policies also account for a large and growing proportion of total government activity. Of the 21,039 public employees counted by the Census in 2002 approximately 13 percent were employed by the federal government, 24 percent by the states, and 63 percent by local governments.13 Approximately one-quarter of all governmental revenues and expenditures were local revenues and expenditures in 2001.14 The tremendous variation in institutions across local governments means that policy outcomes can be highly varied in different contexts.15 Additionally, as a result of the decentralized structure of American government, the local level is charged with implementing many federal and state policies. There can be substantial variation in enactment and ultimately the success or failure of such policies.16 The trend toward devolution of policy-making authority over the last 20 years has meant that local governments have come to play an increasingly large role in the creation of public policy. In general, residents tend to care deeply about the outcomes produced by local governments—from schools, to public safety, to land use decisions. Since the 1960s the American National Election Study (ANES) has asked respondents to state what they think is the most important problem (or problems) facing the nation. Starting in the 1980s social welfare issues like housing, unemployment, and education have ranked among respondents’ top three concerns, and since the 1990s, public order issues like crime, drugs, and gun control have ranked among the top three.17 Although not exclusively the province of local governments, these issues represent a significant proportion of the political activity at the sub-state level. Additionally, about 85 percent of respondents agree that local elections are important.18 When asked about the performance of different levels of government, about 31 percent of respondents stated that their local government was doing a good or very good job, compared to 26 percent of respondents who rated state government that way, and only 15 percent of respondents who felt the same about the federal government.19 Yet, despite the importance of local government, we lack a comprehensive body of theoretically driven research that explains variation in policy outcomes and public opinion at the local level. On another note, many non-local topics cannot be adequately studied without attention to local politics. In a large number of policy arenas, nationallevel debates and federal policy have grown out of local level activity, which in turn affects local politics. For example, scholars have argued that elements of the modern conservative movement first developed in cities as a response to particular urban challenges relating to race, redistribution, taxation, jobs, education, and the provision of services.20 Similarly, Prohibition-era restrictions on the sale, manufacture, and transport of alcohol were first passed and fought in cities, counties, and states, and were motivated by a desire to assimilate immigrants and Catholics who represented significant demographic groups in early cities. The Constitutional amendment enacting Prohibition nationwide in turn had an enormous effect on city governance as

10  PART I    Governance and Political Economy local politicians became enmeshed with underworld activity and city police forces became the enforcers of various facets of the federal law.21 Federal housing policy also shows evidence of a cyclical relationship between local politics and national policy. The racially discriminatory regulations of the federal Home Owners Loan Corporation, the Federal Housing Administration, and the Veteran’s Administration mortgage programs institutionalized practices that had been developed by local-level entrepreneurs to keep blacks segregated in northern cities.22 The federal programs in turn reinforced racial divisions in cities throughout the twentieth century.23 Truly understanding federal practices like these requires an understanding of the local context that gave rise to the policies in the first place and the effects that the federal policies have in cities in an ongoing way. Scholars of democracy and inequality have also come to realize that unpacking puzzles (and discovering solutions) in these realms requires a complex understanding of space and place that necessitates a focus on local factors.24 Socio-demographic and political contexts matter for determining whether people participate in politics, how they participate in politics, and what the effects of their participation are likely to be. For instance, recent work by Oliver and Wong shows that racial attitudes are significantly affected by the level of integration in respondents’ neighborhoods; more diversity leads to more positive attitudes towards out-groups.25 Understanding the relationship between segregation and racial attitudes can help us predict and explain political patterns over time and across places. On another topic, Gimpel, Dyck, and Shaw find that Republicans are less likely to vote when they live in Democratic neighborhoods even when controlling for individual socioeconomic characteristics.26 Thus, the local context is likely to shape political outcomes in a variety of ways. But scholars must be attentive not only to the effects of local context on political actors and outcomes but also to those factors that shape the context itself, which means attending to local political processes. Local policy variation inevitably leads to residential and business location decisions, which generate segregation along various dimensions (race, class, educational attainment, etc.). In turn, this sorting affects important political outcomes like citizen participation, polarization of opinions, and inequality.27 Swanstrom explains that “a special strength of [the urban politics field] is its ability to expose and contest the background conditions that shape metropolitan development and disable American democracy.”28

Methods Issues Regardless of the arguments for studying cities substantively, many scholars will be more interested in questions that are not unique to local politics. But there are still methodological reasons to invoke the local level in the

CHAPTER 1   The Pillars of American Urban Scholarship in a Global Age   11

study of political science because there are many generalizable lessons that can be gleaned from cities. In the past scholars fruitfully turned to cities to answer a range of important political science questions. Dahl drew far reaching conclusions about the nature of power and democracy by analyzing urban redevelopment, public education, and partisan politics in New Haven, Connecticut.29 Sayre and Kaufman studied delegation, bureaucratic control, and effective governance using the unique case of New York City.30 Hunter, Bachrach and Baratz, and Gaventa all relied on city settings to explain forms of influence and agenda control.31 Browning, Marshall, and Tabb investigated the processes of coalition building and political incorporation by analyzing a sample of California cities.32 Other scholars have used larger data sets to study local politics, like Aiken and Alford, who analyzed the distribution of federal funds in more than 600 cities, or Welch and Bledsoe, who studied the effect of institutions on representation in hundreds of communities.33 These classic works were able to draw insightful conclusions because there are political lessons that transcend jurisdictional boundaries. However, the integration between the study of local phenomena and larger political science questions has been weak over the last two decades. Today, tremendous opportunities exist for scholars to reconnect local politics to the mainstream. Many institutional and behavioral factors vary substantially at the sub-state level. This variation is particularly important in the study of institutions that tend to vary slowly or not at all at the national level and in only a limited way at the state level. For instance, whereas all members of Congress and most members of state legislatures are elected in singlemember districts, most cities elect some or all of their members in multimember (at-large) elections and they change the number and proportions of councilors elected in each type of system over time. Scholars have analyzed how the selection method affects the election of certain types of candidates (such as racial and ethnic minorities and women), but the reasons that these institutions have differential effects remain under-studied. For instance, my article with Melody Valdini finds that white women are more likely to be represented on at-large (versus districted) councils but additional research is needed to explain why.34 Perhaps voters are more willing to diversify in at-large settings when they can choose women and men in the same election or, alternatively, that multi-member elections change the strategies of elites (or a combination of both). Knowing which argument has more explanatory power could help us to learn more about why women remain underrepresented in Congress as well as in cities and better understand how voters use gender as a heuristic in voting. The role of political parties also varies in local elections. Most locallyelected officials run on nonpartisan ballots where their party label is not printed next to their name, but about 23 percent are officially partisan.35 Even in non-partisan systems, the degree to which parties actually participate

12  PART I    Governance and Political Economy varies widely. In some cases both parties are active and well represented in elected offices; in others, one party accounts for all (or nearly all) of the activity and representation. In still other cases, parties are relatively absent from the political scene. Such differences offer scholars the opportunity to analyze election outcomes and policy-making in different partisan environments. The variance across cases and sheer size of the N allows for better analysis in part because of the presence of control cases. Matching is much easier in this context. If we think that party labels matter when voters select candidates, it is useful to also include cases in which party labels are not available. Similarly, if one argues that partisan control of the legislature matters more than ideological distribution, it might be helpful to compare cases in which parties officially organize legislators and where they do not. And because the size, institutionalization, and professionalization of city councils varies extensively across time and place, scholars have the opportunity to study how changes in these factors affect everything from elections to representation. Diversity at the local level is also useful for scholars invoking qualitative methods. Peter John explains that because scholars have access to large numbers of cases with a high degree of natural variation, “researcher[s] can select cases on variations in the independent variable as well as ensure that the dependent variable varies too.”36 Particularly for scholars interested in difficult-to-study topics, like understanding the ways in which access to power holders is important for achieving policy outcomes, or why party activists become involved in politics, the small-ness and variety of contexts at the local level can be beneficial.

Different Answers at Different Levels Theories do not sufficiently explain a large amount of local phenomena at this point, and significant findings at the local level have remained unincorporated into political science more generally. In my view, the most promising urban scholarship strives to do both of these things. That is, we can study particularly interesting local-level topics and use the methodological advantages that come from variation to address general questions in political science. A focus on the uniqueness of cities is one way to invoke both benefits. For example, cities have a different set of public responsibilities than states or the federal government, many of which have clear distributive implications. Scholars interested in determining whether or not the government works, and for whom it works, may find more precise (and collectable) measures at the local level than at state or national levels. One might investigate which neighborhoods have well-maintained parks, schools, and libraries and which do not, or analyze where crime, sewer overflows, and fires are most likely

CHAPTER 1   The Pillars of American Urban Scholarship in a Global Age   13

to occur. More frequently than is true at the federal level, residents tend to share views on the desirability of these kinds of outcomes and the connection between political decisions and outcomes can be relatively clear. Scholars might then use these data to explain the factors that enhance representation in a democratic system more generally. The urban politics field has also traditionally researched questions that have been, at best, peripheral to national level research agendas, but that should be relevant to the broader political universe. A large body of urban scholarship pioneered by Clarence Stone, referred to as regime theory, analyzes how informal power plays a role in the development and implementation of policy.37 Regime theory integrates political and economic forces in order to evaluate the governance of cities and explores the role of voters in varied political and economic contexts. Clearly, public and private power intersect at other levels of government and scholars might use the insights of regime theory to build theories elsewhere. For example, recent work on the relationship between federal policy and citizens’ preferences has offered substantial evidence that what voters (or some subsets of voters) want has little relevance to major government initiatives.38 Drawing on regime theory could help scholars to derive expectations about the conditions under which we might expect participation to be more or less significant. The effect of patronage was once a dominant focus of local-politics literature. Since the demise of the classic political machine, very little has been written on patronage. At the national level, scholarship on the bureaucracy has tended to focus on understanding executive and Congressional control with scant attention to the electoral benefits of patronage appointments. A  return to local level analysis could contribute to our understanding of the bureaucracy more generally by taking advantage of the large numbers of municipal employees (and wide variation across cities) and the historical linkage between reelection and patronage. By doing so scholars might gain insight into the effect of public employment on elections and the tradeoffs between bureaucratic performance and electoral rationales. Other scholars have found that inattention to the local level has led previous analysts to draw, at best, incomplete pictures of the political world. One example comes from the field of American political development. Contrary to the received wisdom among many scholars of American political development, William Novak (1996) argues that the nineteenthcentury American state was not weak, nor governed by an extreme Lockean liberalism.39 He comes to understand this by looking to state and local laws where he finds substantial regulation of social life in early America. A second example comes from the domain of voting. Zoltan Hajnal and I take advantage of the varying demographic composition across cities to analyze the effect on election outcomes of differential levels of turnout among

14  PART I    Governance and Political Economy minority groups.40 We find that contrary to evidence at the national level, turnout imbalances can make a difference to political results particularly where minorities make up substantial proportions of the population.

Hurdles Clearly then, studying local politics offers benefits to scholars interested in many different kinds of questions. However, there are serious challenges at this point to embarking on such a path. Lack of centralized data presents one of the biggest hurdles. The dearth of quantitative studies of local politics is both a cause and effect of this shortage. Students searching for large data sets to mine have few options at the local level. This is made even more complicated by difficulty in determining exactly how to measure the proper political community (e.g. incorporated cities vs. metropolitan areas). In the past it was particularly troublesome to collect election returns at the local level. The emergence of the Internet has helped substantially. But it continues to be true that answering an interesting question frequently requires collecting the data oneself. In some cases, e.g., conducting a survey across multiple locales, the collection can be extremely expensive. Additionally, there are unique methodological challenges in studying cities, given their subordinate status in the political system and the strong influences of neighboring places. These hurdles will become less onerous as more scholars enter the local politics field and share their data and methods, but for now new local-politics scholars must confront these challenges. Second, some scholars will view the uniqueness of the local context and local politics as a liability. It is true that the collective action problems on city councils will never rival the problems faced by Congress and that most local elections will be far less visible than state or national elections. Effectively using the distinctive qualities of local politics to inform larger questions in political science requires that scholars be attentive to the lessons that cannot be applied at other levels of government as well. Cities are different—they have diverse demographic distributions, elite networks are relatively small, conflict over space is paramount, they compete for population and businesses, and they have unique functional responsibilities. This inevitably means that some aspects of local-politics scholarship will never be interesting to scholars outside of the subfield. This does not mean that studying local politics for its own sake is unimportant. On the contrary, I believe that our knowledge of American politics remains incomplete without a thorough understanding of local political phenomena; but it does mean that there are some debates that will remain confined to the subfield. For example, one of the arguments that I make elsewhere is that machine and reform political coalitions are more similar than the classic urban literature has suggested.41 While I believe this to be an important contribution to a central urban politics debate, this particular

CHAPTER 1   The Pillars of American Urban Scholarship in a Global Age   15

facet of my book is not likely to transcend the urban field (or be interesting to scholars who have no interest in local politics per se). However, pieces of the book relate to larger debates, including discussions of the mechanisms that coalitions use to capture and keep power and analyses of turnout and policy responsiveness when coalitions dominate for long periods of time. I see both kinds of contributions as important when studying politics at the city level. Because it is a mistake to assume that the constraints, patterns, and processes that have been explained well at the national level will directly translate at the local level, pursing local research can be difficult and time consuming—as if starting from scratch. It is not enough to just “use” cities as cases, because cities may well be different. The flip side is that there are tremendous opportunities for theory building, description, and explanation at the local level using a wide range of methods. In sum, even recognizing these hurdles, there are good reasons to study local politics. Doing so can offer both substantive and methodological benefits, and ultimately advance our knowledge of political phenomena. Maybe someday it will be the case that when classes are taught on elections, at least one segment is dedicated to understanding elections in cities, both because these elections are like other kinds of elections and because they are not. Research on local politics can and should contribute to broader debates in political science and ensure that we understand both how and why cities are unique.

Notes   1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8

Peterson 1981. Judd 2005, 123. Imbroscio 2008. Sapotichne, Jones, and Wolfe 2007; Peterson 1981. See Imbroscio 2006 or Kantor 2008 for a longer discussion. Judd 2005. Lieberman 2009. I view the study of sub-national politics in places outside of the United States as a thoroughly worthwhile endeavor. While many of the claims that I make here will apply in the comparative context, some will not. I focus on U.S. politics (because it is my area of expertise), but I urge others to weigh in on the applicability of these arguments elsewhere.   9 I do not consider part of the local politics field scholarship that analyzes national level political outcomes or processes using sub-state levels of aggregation but which does not attend to local political factors that affect such outcomes. For instance, an analysis of congressional elections using precinct-level vote shares to learn about the demographics of members’ supporters, while interesting, is not an example of local-politics scholarship unless it engages a discussion about the local factors that gives rise to the demographic or vote patterns.

16  PART I    Governance and Political Economy 10 For the local level see http://www.census.gov/prod/2/gov/gc/gc92_1_2.pdf; for the state level see http://www.ncsl.org/programs/legismgt/about/legislator_overview.htm. 11 The qualifier is necessary here because there are no data sources for local-level elections so we cannot know whether or not more ballots are cast for local, state, or national candidates in a given period. Data from one county in North Carolina suggest that most votes are cast in state-level elections. Between 2003 and 2006, voters in Wayne County, NC. cast 137,179 votes for federal offices, 532,346 votes for state offices (excluding elected judges), and 251,338 ballots for county and municipal offices. 12 See Elkin 2006 for example. 13 http://www.census.gov/prod/2004pubs/gc023x2.pdf 14 http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/fy2008/pdf/hist.pdf and http://www. census.gov/prod/2005pubs/gc024x5.pdf. 15 Mullin 2008, Berry and Gersen 2007. 16 See for example Greenstone and Peterson 1973, and Brooks, Phillips, and Ogorzalek 2008. 17 This question frames the concerns at the national level so it could be that respondents are particularly noting the federal government’s responsibility in these areas. Nonetheless it still indicates that these issue areas in which local governments are heavily involved are extremely important to residents. 18 This question was asked in ANES years 1952–1980. 19 These questions were asked between the years 1974 and 1980. Unweighted frequency distributions generated using http://sda.berkeley.edu/cgi-bin32/ hsda?harcsdanes2004c for variables VCF0618, VCF0650, VCF0651, and VCF0652. 20 Kruse 2005, O’Connor 2007, and Self 2003; I am indebted to Clarence Stone for pointing out this link and these scholars to me. 21 Lerner 2007. 22 Massey and Denton 1993, Jones-Correa 2009. 23 Hayward 2003, 2009. 24 E.g., Macedo et al. 2005, Karpowitz and Macedo 2006. 25 Oliver and Wong 2003. 26 Gimpel, Dyck, and Shaw 2004. 27 Dreier, Mollenkopf, and Swanstrom 2001. 28 Swanstrom 2008. 29 Dahl 1961. 30 Sayre and Kaufman 1960. 31 Hunter 1953, Bachrach and Baratz 1962, and Gaventa 1982. 32 Browning, Marshall, and Tabb 1984. 33 Aiken and Alford 1970, Welch and Bledsoe 1988. 34 Trounstine and Valdini 2008. 35 International City County Managers Association 2001. 36 John 2006. 37 See Stone 1989. 38 Bartels 2008, Gilens 2005. 39 Novak 1996. 40 Hajnal and Trounstine 2005. 41 Trounstine 2008.

CHAPTER 1   The Pillars of American Urban Scholarship in a Global Age   17

References Aiken, Michael, and Robert Alford. 1970. Community structure and innovation: The case of public housing. American Political Science Review 64 (3): 843–64. Bachrach, Peter, and Morton Baratz. 1962. Two faces of power. American Political Science Review 56 (4): 947–52. Bartels, Larry. 2008. Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Berry, Christopher, and Jacob Gersen. 2007. “The Fiscal Consequences of Electoral Institutions.” Harris School Working Paper Series 07.13. Available at http://harrisschool.uchicago.edu/About/publications/working-papers/pdf/wp_ 07_13.pdf. Brooks, Leah, Justin Phillips, and Tom Ogorzalek. 2008. “Can Municipal Governments Be Trusted with Policy Implementation? A Re-Evaluation of Federal Block Grants.” Typescript. Browning, Rufus, Dale Rogers Marshall, and David H. Tabb. 1984. Protest Is Not Enough: The Struggle of Blacks and Hispanics for Equality in Urban Politics. Berkeley: University of California Press. Dahl, Robert. 1961. Who Governs? Democracy and Power in an American City. New Haven: Yale University Press. Dreier, Peter, John Mollenkopf, and Todd Swanstrom. 2001. Place Matters: Metropolitics for the Twenty-First Century. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas. Elkin, Stephen. 2006. Reconstructing the Commercial Republic: Constitutional Design after Madison. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gaventa, John. 1982. Power and Powerlessness: Quiescence and Rebellion in an Appalachian Valley. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Gilens, Martin. 2005. Inequality and democratic responsiveness. Public Opinion Quarterly 69 (5): 778–96. Gimpel, James, Joshua Dyck, and Daron Shaw. 2004. Registrants, voters, and turnout variability across neighborhoods. Political Behavior 26 (4): 343–75. Greenstone, J. David, and Paul E. Peterson. 1973. Race and Authority in Urban Politics Community Participation and the War on Poverty. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Hajnal, Zoltan, and Jessica Trounstine. 2005. Where turnout matters: The consequences of uneven turnout in city politics. Journal of Politics 67 (2): 515–35. Hayward, Clarissa Rile. 2003. The difference states make: Democracy, identity, and the American city. American Political Science Review 97 (4): 501–14. Lieberman, Robert C. 2009. Urban space and American political development: Identity, interest, action. In The City in American Political Development, ed. Richardson Dilworth. New York: Routledge Press. Imbroscio, David L. 2006. Shaming the inside game: A critique of the liberal expansionist approach to addressing urban problems. Urban Affairs Review 42 (2): 224–48. Imbroscio, David L. 2008. “Stunted solipsism”? A defense of the urban politics field. Urban News The Newsletter of the Urban Politics Section, American Political Science Association 22 (1): 14–16. International City County Managers Association. 2001. Municipal Form of Government Survey.

18  PART I    Governance and Political Economy John, Peter. 2006. “Why Study Urban Politics.” Presented at the Political Studies Association Conference, Reading. Available at: http://www.ipeg.org.uk/papers/ Why%20study%20urban%20politics040406.pdf. Jones-Correa, Michael. 2009. Riots as critical junctures. In The City in American Political Development, ed. Richardson Dilworth. New York: Routledge Press. Judd, Dennis. 2005. Everything is always going to hell: Urban scholars as end-times prophets. Urban Affairs Review 41 (2): 119–31. Kantor, Paul. 2008. Where is intellectual creativity? Urban News: The Newsletter of the Urban Politics Section, American Political Science Association, 22 (1): 11–12. Karpowitz, Chris, and Stephen Macedo. 2006. The local roots of American inequality. PS Political Science and Politics 39 (1): 59–64. Kruse, Kevin. 2005. White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Lerner, Michael. 2007. Dry Manhattan: Prohibition in New York City. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Lieberman, Robert. 2009. The city and exceptionalism in American political development. In The City in American Political Development, ed. Richardson Dilworth. New York: Routledge Press. Macedo, Stephen, et al. 2005. Democracy at Risk: How Political Choices Undermine Citizen Participation, and What We Can Do About It. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press. Massey, Douglas, and Nancy Denton. 1993. American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Mullin, Megan. 2008. The conditional effect of specialized governance on public policy. American Journal of Political Science 52 (1): 125–41. Novak, William. 1996. The People’s Welfare: Law and Regulation in Nineteenth-Century America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. O’Connor, Alice. 2007. The privatized city: The Manhattan Institute, the urban crisis,  and  the counterrevolution in New York. Journal of Urban History 34 (2): 333–53. Oliver, Eric, and Janelle Wong. 2003. Intergroup prejudice in multiethnic settings. American Journal of Political Science 47 (4): 567–82. Peterson, Paul E. 1981. City Limits. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sapotichne, Joshua, Bryan D. Jones, and Michelle Wolfe. 2007. Is urban politics a “black hole”? Analyzing the boundary between political science and urban politics. Urban Affairs Review 43 (1): 76–106. Sayre, Wallace, and Herbert Kaufman. 1960. Governing New York City: Politics in the Metropolis. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Self, Robert. 2003. American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland. Princeton Princeton University Press. Stone, Clarence N. 1989. Regime Politics: Governing Atlanta 1946–1988. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. Swanstrom, Todd. 2008. “Honey, They Shrunk the Field! Making Urban Political Science Big Again.” Urban News: The Newsletter of the Urban Politics Section, American Political Science Association 22 (1): 14–16. Trounstine, Jessica. 2008. Political Monopolies in American Cities: The Rise and Fall of Bosses and Reformers. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

CHAPTER 1   The Pillars of American Urban Scholarship in a Global Age   19 Trounstine, Jessica, and Melody Ellis Valdini. 2008. The context matters: The effects of single member versus at-large districts on city council diversity. American Journal of Political Science 52 (3): 554–69. Welch, Susan, and Timothy Bledsoe. 1988. Urban Reform and its Consequences: A Study in Representation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

2 The Interests of the Limited City Paul E. Peterson† Like all social structures, cities have interests. Just as we can speak of union interests, judicial interests, and the interests of politicians so we can speak of the interests of that structured system of social interactions we call a city. Citizens, politicians, and academics are all quite correct in speaking freely of the interests of cities.1

Defining the City Interest By a city’s interest, I do not mean the sum total of the interests of those individuals living in the city. For one thing, these are seldom, if ever, known. The wants, needs, and preferences of residents continually change, and few surveys of public opinion in particular cities have ever been taken. Moreover, the residents of a city often have discordant interests. Some want more parkland and better schools; others want better police protection and lower taxes. Some want an elaborated highway system; others wish to keep cars out of their neighborhood. Some want more inexpensive, publicly subsidized housing; others wish to remove the public housing that exists. Some citizens want improved welfare assistance for the unemployed and dependent; others wish to cut drastically all such programs of public aid. Some citizens want rough-tongued ethnic politicians in public office; others wish that municipal administration were a gentleman’s calling. Especially in large cities, the cacophony of competing claims by diverse class, race, ethnic, and occupational groups makes impossible the determination of any overall city interest-any public interest, if you like-by compiling all the demands and desires of individual city residents. † Used with permission of University of Chicago Press - Books, from City Limits, Peterson, Paul E., 1st Edition, 1981, pp. 17–30, 231–232; permission conveyed through Copyright Clearance Center, Inc.

20  PART I    Governance and Political Economy Some political scientists have attempted to discover the overall urban public interest by summing up the wide variety of individual interests. The earlier work of Edward Banfield, still worth examination, is perhaps the most persuasive effort of this kind.2 He argued that urban political processes-or at least those in Chicago-allowed for the expression of nearly all the particular interests within the city. Every significant interest was represented by some economic firm or voluntary association, which had a stake in trying to influence those public policies that touched its vested interests. After these various groups and firms had debated and contended, the political leader searched for a compromise that took into account the vital interests of each, and worked out a solution all could accept with some satisfaction. The leader’s own interest in sustaining his political power dictated such a strategy. Banfield’s argument is intriguing, but few people would identify public policies as being in the interest of the City simply because they have been formulated according to certain procedures. The political leader might err in his judgment; the interests of important but politically impotent groups might never get expressed; or the consequences of a policy might in the long run be disastrous for the city. Moreover, most urban policies are not hammered out after great controversy, but are the quiet product of routine decision making. How does one evaluate which of these are in the public interest? Above all, this mechanism for determining the city’s interest provides no standpoint for evaluating the substantive worth of urban policies. Within Banfield’s framework, whatever urban governments do is said to be in the interest of their communities. But the concept of city interest is used most persuasively when there are calls for reform or innovation. It is a term used to evaluate existing programs and to discriminate between promising and undesirable new ones. To equate the interests of cities with what cities are doing is to so impoverish the term as to make it quite worthless. The economist Charles Tiebout employs a second approach to the identification of city interests.3 Unlike Banfield, he does not see the city’s interests as a mere summation of individual interests but as something which can be ascribed to the entity, taken as a whole. As an economist, Tiebout is hardly embarrassed by such an enterprise, because in ascribing interests to cities his work parallels both those orthodox economists who state that firms have an interest in maximizing profits and those welfare economists who claim that politicians have an interest in maximizing votes. Of course, they state only that their model will assume that firms and politicians behave in such a way, but insofar as they believe their model has empirical validity, they in fact assert that those constrained by the businessman’s or politician’s role must pursue certain interests. And so does Tiebout when he says that communities seek to attain the optimum size for the efficient delivery of the bundle of services the local government produces. In his words, “Communities below the optimum size seek to attract new residents to lower average costs.

CHAPTER 1   The Pillars of American Urban Scholarship in a Global Age   21

Those above optimum size do just the opposite. Those at an optimum try to keep their populations constant.”4 Tiebout’s approach is in many ways very attractive. By asserting a strategic objective that the city is trying to maximize—optimum size—Tiebout identifies an overriding interest which can account for specific policies the city adopts. He provides a simple analytical tool that will account for the choices cities make, without requiring complex investigations into citizen preferences and political mechanisms for identifying and amalgamating the same. Moreover, he provides a criterion for determining whether a specific policy is in the interest of the city-does it help achieve optimum size? Will it help the too small city grow? Will it help the too big city contract? Will it keep the optimally sized city in equilibrium? Even though the exact determination of the optimum size cannot presently be scientifically determined in all cases, the criterion does provide a useful guide for prudential decision making. The difficulty with Tiebout’s assumption is that he does not give very good reasons for its having any plausibility. When most economists posit a certain form of maximizing behavior, there is usually a good commonsense reason for believing the person in that role will have an interest in pursuing this strategic objective. When orthodox economists say that businessmen maximize profits, it squares with our understanding in everyday life that people engage in commercial enterprises for monetary gain. The more they make, the better they like it. The same can be said of those welfare economists who say politicians maximize votes. The assumption, though cynical, is in accord with popular belief—and therefore once again has a certain plausibility. By contrast, Tiebout’s optimum size thesis diverges from what most people think cities are trying to do. Of course, smaller communities are often seeking to expand—boosterism may be the quintessential characteristic of small-town America. Yet Tiebout takes optimum size, not growth or maximum size, as the strategic objective. And when Tiebout discusses the big city that wishes to shrink to optimum size, his cryptic language is quite unconvincing. “The case of the city that is too large and tries to get rid of residents is more difficult to imagine,” he confesses. Even more, he concedes that “no alderman in his right political mind would ever admit that the city is too big.” “Nevertheless,” he continues, “economic forces are at work to push people out of it. Every resident who moves to the suburbs to find better schools, more parks, and so forth, is reacting, in part, against the pattern the city has to offer.”5 In this crucial passage Tiebout speaks neither of local officials nor of local public policies. Instead, he refers to “economic forces” that may be beyond the control of the city and of “every resident,” each of whom may be pursuing his own interests, not that of the community at large. The one reason Tiebout gives for expecting cities to pursue optimum size is to lower the average cost of public goods. If public goods can be delivered

22  PART I    Governance and Political Economy most efficiently at some optimum size, then migration of residents will occur until that size has been reached. In one respect Tiebout is quite correct: local governments must concern themselves with operating local services as efficiently as possible in order to protect the city’s economic interests. But there is little evidence that there is an optimum size at which services can be delivered with greatest efficiency. And even if such an optimum did exist, it could be realized only if migration occurred among residents who paid equal amounts in local taxes. In the more likely situation, residents pay variable prices for public services (for example, the amount paid in local property taxes varies by the value of the property). Under these circumstances, increasing size to the optimum does not reduce costs to residents unless newcomers pay at least as much in taxes as the marginal increase in costs their arrival imposes on city government.6 Conversely, if a city needs to lose population to reach the optimum, costs to residents will not decline unless the exiting population paid less in taxes than was the marginal cost of providing them government services. In most big cities losing population, exactly the opposite is occurring. Those who pay more in taxes than they receive in services are the emigrants. Tiebout’s identification of city interests with optimum size, while suggestive, fails to take into account the quality as well as the quantity of the local population. The interests of cities are neither a summation of individual interests nor the pursuit of optimum size. Instead, policies and programs can be said to be in the interest of cities whenever the policies maintain or enhance the economic position, social prestige, or political power of the city, taken as a whole.7 Cities have these interests because cities consist of a set of social interactions structured by their location in a particular territorial space. Any time that social interactions come to be structured into recurring patterns, the structure thus formed develops an interest in its own maintenance and enhancement. It is in that sense that we speak of the interests of an organization, the interests of the system, and the like. To be sure, within cities, as within any other structure, one can find diverse social roles, each with its own set of interests. But these varying role interests, as divergent and competing as they may be, do not distract us from speaking of the overall interests of the larger structural entity.8 The point can be made less abstractly. A school system is a structured form of social action, and therefore it has an interest in maintaining and improving its material resources, its prestige, and its political power. Those policies or events which have such positive effects are said to be in the interest of the school system. An increase in state financial aid or the winning of the basketball tournament are events that, respectively, enhance the material well-being and the prestige of a school system and are therefore in its interest. In ordinary speech this is taken for granted, even when we also recognize

CHAPTER 1   The Pillars of American Urban Scholarship in a Global Age   23

that teachers, pupils, principals, and board members may have contrasting interests as members of differing role-groups within the school. Although social roles performed within cities are numerous and conflicting, all are structured by the fact that they take place in a specific spatial location that falls within the jurisdiction of some local government. All members of the city thus come to share an interest in policies that affect the well-being of that territory. Policies which enhance the desirability or attractiveness of the territory are in the city’s interest, because they benefit all residents—in their role as residents of the community. Of course, in any of their other social roles, residents of the city may be adversely affected by the policy. The Los Angeles dope peddler – in his role as peddler – hardly benefits from a successful drive to remove hard drugs from the city. On the other hand, as a resident of the city, he benefits from a policy that enhances the attractiveness of the city as a locale in which to live and work. In determining whether a policy is in the interest of a city, therefore, one does not consider whether it has a positive or negative effect on the total range of social interactions of each and every individual. That is an impossible task. To know whether a policy is in a city’s interest, one has to consider only the impact on social relationships insofar as they are structured by their taking place within the city’s boundaries. An illustration from recent policy debates over the future of our cities reveals that it is exactly with this meaning that the notion of a city’s interest is typically used. The tax deduction that homeowners take on their mortgage interest payments should be eliminated, some urbanists have argued. The deduction has not served the interests of central cities, because it has provided a public subsidy for families who purchase suburban homes. Quite clearly, elimination of this tax deduction is not in the interest of those central city residents who wish to purchase a home in the suburbs. It is not in the interest of those central city homeowners (which in some cities may even form a majority of the voting population), who would then be called upon to pay higher federal taxes. But the policy might very well improve the rental market in the central city, thereby stimulating its economy-and it is for this reason that the proposal has been defended as being in the interest of central cities. To say that people understand what, generally, is in the interest of cities does not eliminate debate over policy alternatives in specific instances. The notion of city interest can be extremely useful, even though its precise application in specific contexts may be quite problematic. In any policy context one cannot easily assert that one “knows” what is in the interest of cities, whether or not the residents of the city agree. But city residents do know the kind of evidence that must be advanced and the kinds of reasons that must be adduced in order to build a persuasive case that a policy is in the interest of cities. And so do community leaders, mayors, and administrative elites.

24  PART I    Governance and Political Economy

Economic Interests Cities, like all structured social systems, seek to improve their position in all three of the systems of stratification-economic, social, and political— characteristic of industrial societies. In most cases, improved standing in any one of these systems helps enhance a city’s position in the other two. In the short run, to be sure, cities may have to choose among economic gains, social prestige, and political weight. And because different cities may choose alternative objectives, one cannot state any one overarching objective—such as improved property values—that is always the paramount interest of the city. But inasmuch as improved economic or market standing seems to be an objective of great importance to most cities, I shall concentrate on this interest and only discuss in passing the significance of social status and political power. Cities constantly seek to upgrade their economic standing. Following Weber, I mean by this that cities seek to improve their market position, their attractiveness as a locale for economic activity. In the market economy that characterizes Western society, an advantageous economic position means a competitive edge in the production and distribution of desired commodities relative to other localities. When this is present, cities can export goods and/or services to those outside the boundaries of the community. Some regional economists have gone so far as to suggest that the welfare of a city is identical to the welfare of its export industry.9 As exporters expand, the city grows, As they contract, the city declines and decays. The economic reasoning supporting such a conclusion is quite straightforward. When cities produce a good that can be sold in an external market, labor and capital flow into the city to help increase the production of that good. They continue to do so until the external market is saturated-that is, until the marginal cost of production within the city exceeds the marginal value of the good external to the city. Those engaged in the production of the exported good will themselves consume a variety of other goods and services, which other businesses will provide. In addition, subsidiary industries locate in the city either because they help supply the exporting industry, because they can utilize some of its byproducts, or because they benefit by some economies of scale provided by its presence. Already, the familiar multiplier is at work. With every increase in the sale of exported commodities, there may be as much as a four- or fivefold increase in local economic activity. The impact of Boeing Aircraft’s market prospects on the economy of the Seattle metropolitan area illustrates the importance of export to regional economies. In the late sixties defense and commercial aircraft contracts declined. Boeing laid off thousands of workmen, the economy of the Pacific Northwest slumped, the unemployed moved elsewhere, and Seattle land values

CHAPTER 1   The Pillars of American Urban Scholarship in a Global Age   25

dropped sharply. More recently, Boeing has more than recovered its former position. With rapidly expanding production at Boeing, the metropolitan area is enjoying low unemployment, rapid growth, and dramatically increasing land values. The same multiplier effect is not at work in the case of goods and services produced for domestic consumption within the territory. What is gained by a producer within the community is expended by other community residents. Residents, in effect, are simply taking in one another’s laundry. Unless productivity increases, there is no capacity for expansion. If this economic analysis is correct, it is only a modest oversimplification to equate the interests of cities with the interests of their export industries. Whatever helps them prosper redounds to the benefit of the community as a whole-perhaps four and five times over. And it is just such an economic analysis that has influenced many local government policies. Especially the smaller towns and cities may provide free land, tax concessions, and favorable utility rates to incoming industries. The smaller the territory and the more primitive its level of economic development, the more persuasive is this simple export thesis. But other economists have elaborated an alternative growth thesis that is in many ways more persuasive, especially as it relates to larger urban areas. In their view a sophisticated local network of public and private services is the key to long-range economic growth. Since the world economy is constantly changing, the economic viability of any particular export industry is highly variable. As a result, a community dependent on any particular set of export industries will have only an episodic economic future. But with a welldeveloped infrastructure of services, the city becomes an attractive locale for a wide variety of export industries. As older exporters fade, new exporters take their place and the community continues to prosper. It is in the city’s interest, therefore, to help sustain a high-quality local infrastructure generally attractive to all commerce and industry. I have no way of evaluating the merits of these contrasting economic arguments. What is important in this context is that both see exports as being of great importance to the well-being of a city. One view suggests a need for direct support of the export industry; the other suggests a need only for maintaining a service infrastructure, allowing the market to determine which particular export industry locates in the community. Either one could be the more correct diagnosis for a particular community, at least in the short run. Yet both recognize that the future of the city depends upon exporting local products. When a city is able to export its products, service industries prosper, labor is in greater demand, wages increase, promotional opportunities widen, land values rise, tax revenues increase, city services can be improved, donations to charitable organizations become more generous, and the social and cultural life of the city is enhanced.

26  PART I    Governance and Political Economy To export successfully, cities must make efficient use of the three main factors of production: land, labor, and capital.10

Land Land is the factor of production that cities control. Yet land is the factor to which cities are bound. It is the fact that cities are spatially defined units whose boundaries seldom change that gives permanence to their interests. City residents come and go, are born and die; and change their tastes and preferences. But the city remains wedded to the land area with which it is blessed (or cursed). And unless it can alter that land area, through annexation or consolidation, it is the long-range value of that land which the city must secure—and which gives a good approximation of how well it is achieving its interests. Land is an economic resource. Production cannot occur except within some spatial location. And because land varies in its economic potential, so do the economic futures of cities. Historically, the most important variable affecting urban growth has been an area’s relationship to land and water routes. On the eastern coast of the United States, all the great cities had natural harbors that facilitated commercial relations with Europe and other coastal communities. Inland, the great industrial cities all were located on either the Great Lakes or the Ohio River-Mississippi River system. The cities of the West, as Elazar has shown, prospered according to their proximity to East-West trade flows.11 Denver became the predominant city of the mountain states because it sat at the crossroads of land routes through the Rocky Mountains. Duluth, Minnesota, had only limited potential, even with its Great Lakes location, because it lay north of all major routes to the West. Access to waterways and other trade routes is not the only way a city’s life is structured by its location. Its climate determines the cost and desirability of habitation; its soil affects food production in the surrounding area; its terrain affects drainage, rates of air pollution, and scenic beauty. Of course, the qualities of landscape do not permanently fix a city’s fate-it is the intersection of that land and location with the larger national and world economy that is critical. For example, cities controlling access to waterways by straddling natural harbors at one time monopolized the most valuable land in the region, and from that position they dominated their hinterland. But since land and air transport have begun to supplant, not just supplement, water transport, the dominance of these once favored cities has rapidly diminished. Although the economic future of a city is very much influenced by external forces affecting the value of its land, the fact that a city has control over the

CHAPTER 1   The Pillars of American Urban Scholarship in a Global Age   27

use of its land gives it some capacity for influencing that future. Although there are constitutional limits to its authority, the discretion available to a local government in determining land use remains the greatest arena for the exercise of local autonomy. Cities can plan the use of local space; cities have the power of eminent domain; through zoning laws cities can restrict all sorts of land uses; and cities can regulate the size, content, and purpose of buildings constructed within their boundaries. Moreover, cities can provide public services in such a way as to encourage certain kinds of land use. Sewers, gas lines, roads, bridges, tunnels, playgrounds, schools, and parks all impinge on the use of land in the surrounding area. Urban politics is above all the politics of land use, and it is easy to see why. Land is the factor of production over which cities exercise the greatest control.

Labor To its land area the city must attract not only capital but productive labor. Yet local governments in the United States are very limited in their capacities to control the flow of these factors. Lacking the more direct controls of nationstates, they are all the more constrained to pursue their economic interests in those areas where they do exercise authority. Labor is an obvious case in point. Since nation-states control migration across their boundaries, the industrially more advanced have formally legislated that only limited numbers of outsiders—for example, relatives of citizens or those with skills needed by the host country—can enter. In a world where it is economically feasible for great masses of the population to migrate long distances, this kind of restrictive legislation seems essential for keeping the nation’s social and economic integrity intact. Certainly; the wage levels and welfare assistance programs characteristic of advanced industrial societies could not be sustained were transnational migration unencumbered. Unlike nation-states, cities cannot control movement across their boundaries. They no longer have walls, guarded and defended by their inhabitants. And as Weber correctly noted, without walls cities no longer have the independence to make significant choices in the way medieval cities once did.12 It is true that local governments often try to keep vagrants, bums, paupers, and racial minorities out of their territory. They are harassed, arrested, thrown out of town, and generally discriminated against. But in most of these cases local governments act unconstitutionally, and even this illegal use of the police power does not control migration very efficiently. Although limited in its powers, the city seeks to obtain an appropriately skilled labor force at wages lower than its competitors so that it can profitably export commodities. In larger cities a diverse work force is desirable. The

28  PART I    Governance and Political Economy service industry, which provides the infrastructure for exporters, recruits large numbers of unskilled workers, and many manufacturing industries need only semiskilled workers. When shortages in these skill levels appear, cities may assist industry in advertising the work and living opportunities of the region. In the nineteenth century when unskilled labor was in short supply, frontier cities made extravagant claims to gain a competitive edge in the supply of ordinary labor. Certain sparsely populated areas, such as Alaska, occasionally advertise for unskilled labor even today. However, competition among most cities is now for highly skilled workers and especially for professional and managerial talent. In a less than full-employment economy, most communities have a surplus of semiskilled and unskilled labor. Increases in the supply of unskilled workers increase the cost of the community’s social services. Since national wage laws preclude a decline in wages below a certain minimum, the increases in the cost of social services are seldom offset by lower wages for unskilled labor in those areas where the unemployed concentrate. But even with high levels of unemployment, there remains a shortage of highly skilled technicians and various types of white collar workers. Where shortages develop, the prices these workers can command in the labor market may climb to a level where local exports are no longer competitive with goods produced elsewhere. The economic health of a community is therefore importantly affected by the availability of professional and managerial talent and of highly skilled technicians. When successfully pursuing their economic interests, cities develop a set of policies that will attract the more skilled and white-collar workers without at the same time attracting unemployables. Of course, there are limits on the number of things cities can do. In contrast to nation-states, they cannot simply forbid entry to all but the highly talented whose skills they desire. But through zoning laws, they can ensure that adequate land is available for middle-class residences. They can provide parks, recreation areas, and good-quality schools in areas where the economically most productive live. They can keep the cost of social services, little utilized by the middle class, to a minimum, thereby keeping local taxes relatively low. In general, they can try to ensure that the benefits of public service outweigh their costs to those highly skilled workers, managers, and professionals who are vital for sustaining the community’s economic growth.

Capital Capital is the second factor of production that must be attracted to an economically productive territory. Accordingly, nation-states place powerful controls on the flow of capital across their boundaries. Many nations strictly regulate the amount of national currency that can be taken out

CHAPTER 1   The Pillars of American Urban Scholarship in a Global Age   29

of the country. They place quotas and tariffs on imported goods. They regulate the rate at which national currency can be exchanged with foreign currency. They regulate the money supply, increasing interest rates when growth is too rapid, lowering interest rates when growth slows down. Debt financing also allows a nation-state to undertake capital expenditures and to encourage growth in the private market. At present the powers of nation-states to control capital flow are being used more sparingly and new supranational institutions are developing in their place. Market forces now seem more powerful than official policies in establishing rates of currency exchange among major industrial societies. Tariffs and other restrictions on trade are subject to retaliation by other countries, and so they must be used sparingly. The economies of industrialized nations are becoming so interdependent that significant changes in the international political economy seem imminent, signaled by numerous international conferences to determine worldwide growth rates, rates of inflation, and levels of unemployment. If these trends continue, nation-states may come to look increasingly like local governments. But these developments at the national level have only begun to emerge. At the local level in the United States, cities are much less able to control capital flows. In the first place, the Constitution has been interpreted to mean that states cannot hinder the free flow of goods and monies across their boundaries. And what is true of states is true of their subsidiary jurisdictions as well. In the second place, states and localities cannot regulate the money supply. If unemployment is low, they cannot stimulate the economy by increasing the monetary flow. If inflationary pressures adversely affect their competitive edge in the export market, localities can neither restrict the money supply nor directly control prices and wages. All of these powers are reserved for national governments. In the third place, local governments cannot spend more than they receive in tax revenues without damaging their credit or even running the risk of bankruptcy. Pump priming, sometimes a national disease, is certainly a national prerogative. Local governments are left with a number of devices for enticing capital into the area. They can minimize their tax on capital and on profits from capital investment. They can reduce the costs of capital investment by providing low-cost public utilities, such as roads, sewers, lights, and police and fire protection. They can even offer public land free of charge or at greatly reduced prices to those investors they are particularly anxious to attract. They can provide a context for business operations free of undue harassment or regulation. For example, they can ignore various external costs of production, such as air pollution, water pollution, and the despoliation of trees, grass, and other features of the landscape. Finally, they can discourage labor from unionizing so as to keep industrial labor costs competitive.

30  PART I    Governance and Political Economy This does not mean it behooves cities to allow any and all profitmaximizing action on the part of an industrial plant. Insofar as the city desires diversified economic growth, no single company can be allowed to pursue policies that seriously detract from the area’s overall attractiveness to capital or productive labor. Taxes cannot be so low that government fails to supply residents with as attractive a package of services as can be found in competitive jurisdictions. Regulation of any particular industry cannot fall so far below nationwide standards that other industries must bear external costs not encountered in other places. The city’s interest in attracting capital does not mean utter subservience to any particular corporation, but a sensitivity to the need for establishing an overall favorable climate. In sum, cities, like private firms, compete with one another so as to maximize their economic position. To achieve this objective, the city must use the resources its land area provides by attracting as much capital and as high a quality labor force as is possible. Like a private firm, the city must entice labor and capital resources by offering appropriate inducements. Unlike the nation-state, the American city does not have regulatory powers to control labor and capital flows. The lack thereof sharply limits what cities can do to control their economic development, but at the same time the attempt by cities to maximize their interests within these limits shapes policy choice.

Local Government and the Interests of Cities Local government leaders are likely to be sensitive to the economic interests of their communities. First, economic prosperity is necessary for protecting the fiscal base of a local government. In the United States, taxes on local sources and charges for local services remain important components of local government revenues. Although transfers of revenue to local units from the federal and state governments increased throughout the postwar period, as late as 1975–76 local governments still were raising almost 59 percent of their own revenue.13 Raising revenue from one’s own economic resources requires continuing local economic prosperity. Second, good government is good politics. By pursuing policies which contribute to the economic prosperity of the local community, the local politician selects policies that redound to his own political advantage. Local politicians, eager for relief from the crosspressures of local politics, assiduously promote goals that have widespread benefits. And few policies are more popular than economic growth and prosperity. Third, and most important, local officials usually have a sense of community responsibility. They know that, unless the economic well-being of the community can be maintained, local business will suffer, workers will

CHAPTER 1   The Pillars of American Urban Scholarship in a Global Age   31

lose employment opportunities, cultural life will decline, and city land values will fall. To avoid such a dismal future, public officials try to develop policies that assist the prosperity of their community—or, at the very least, that do not seriously detract from it. Quite apart from any effects of economic prosperity on government revenues or local voting behavior, it is quite reasonable to posit that local governments are primarily interested in maintaining the economic vitality of the area for which they are responsible. Accordingly, governments can be expected to attempt to maximize this particular goal—within the numerous environmental constraints with which they must contend. As policy alternatives are proposed, each is evaluated according to how well it will help to achieve this objective. Although information is imperfect and local governments cannot be expected to select the one best alternative on every occasion, policy choices over time will be limited to those few which can plausibly be shown to be conducive to the community’s economic prosperity. Internal disputes and disagreements may affect policy on the margins, but the major contours of local revenue policy will be determined by this strategic objective.

Notes   1 Flathman, R. E. 1966. The public interest (New York: John Wiley).   2 Banfield, E. C. 1961. Political influence (Glencoe, Illinois: Free Press). Ch. 12.  3 Tiebout, C. M. 1956. A pure theory of local expenditures. Journal of Political Economy 64: 416-424.   4 Ibid., p. 419.   5 Ibid., p. 420.  6 Bruce Hamilton, “Property Taxes and the Tiebout Hypothesis: Some Empirical Evidence,” and Michelle J. White, “Fiscal Zoning in Fragmented Metropolitan Areas,” in Mills, E. S., and Oates, W. E. 1975. Fiscal zoning and land use controls (Lexington, Massachusetts: Lexington Books). Chs. 2 and 3.   7 See Weber, “Class, Status, and Power,” in Gerth, H. H., and Mills, C. W., trans. 1946. From Max Weber (New York: Oxford University Press).   8 For a more complete discussion of roles, structures, and interests, see Greenstone, J. D., and Peterson, P. E. 1976. Race and authority in urban politics. Phoenix edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Ch. 2.   9 Cf. Thompson, W. R. 1965. A preface to urban economics (Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press). 10 I treat entrepreneurial skill as simply another form of labor, even though it is a form in short supply. 11 Elazar, D. J. 1976. Cities of the prairie (New York: Basic Books). 12 Weber, M. 1921. The city (New York: Collier Books). 13 United States Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census. 1977. Local government finances in selected metropolitan areas and large counties: 1975-76. Government finances: GF 76, no. 6.

32  PART I    Governance and Political Economy

3 The Future of Urban Regime Studies Clarence N. Stone‡ What makes governance in Atlanta effective is not the formal machinery of government, but rather the informal partnership between city hall and the downtown business elite. This informal partnership and the way it operates constitute the city’s regime; it is the means through which major policy decisions are made. The word “regime” connotes different things to different people, but in this [selection] regime is specifically about the informal arrangements that surround and complement the formal workings of governmental authority. All governmental authority in the United States is greatly limited-limited by the Constitution, limited perhaps even more by the nation’s political tradition, and limited structurally by the autonomy of privately owned business enterprise. The exercise of public authority is thus never a simple matter; it is almost always enhanced by extraformal considerations. Because local governmental authority is by law and tradition even more limited than authority at the state and national level, informal arrangements assume special importance in urban politics: But we should begin our understanding of regimes by realizing that informal arrangements are by no means peculiar to cities or, for that matter, to government. Even narrowly bounded organizations, those with highly specific functional responsibilities, develop informal governing coalitions.1 As Chester Barnard argued many years ago, formal goals and formal lines of authority are insufficient by themselves to bring about coordinated action with sufficient energy to accomplish organizational purposes,2 commitment and cooperation do not just spring up from the lines of an organization chart. Because every formal organization gives rise to an informal one, Barnard concluded, successful executives must master the skill of shaping and using informal organization for their purposes. ‡ First half: Regime Politics: Governing Atlanta, 1946–1988 by Clarence N. Stone, pp. 3–12, published by the University Press of Kansas © 1989. www.kansaspress.ku.edu. Used by permission of the publisher. Second half: Used with permission of SAGE Publications Inc. Journals, from ‘Reflections on Regime Politics: From Governing Coalition to Urban Political Order’, Stone, Clarence, Urban Affairs Review, 51.1, 1995, pp. 109–116 (American Political Science Association. Urban and Local Politics Section, University of Illinois at Chicago. College of Urban Planning and Public Affairs); permission conveyed through Copyright Clearance Center, Inc.

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Attention to informal arrangements takes various forms. In the analysis of business firms, the school of thought labeled “transaction cost economics” has given systematic attention to how things actually get done in a world full of social friction-basically the same question that Chester Barnard considered. A leading proponent of this approach, Oliver Williamson,3 finds that what he terms “private orderings” (as opposed to formal and legal agreements) are enormously important in the running of business affairs. For many transactions, mutual and tacit understanding is a more efficient way of conducting relations than are legal agreements and formal contracts. Williamson quotes a business executive as saying, “You can settle any dispute if you keep the lawyers and accountants out of it. They just do not understand the give-and-take needed in business. “4 Because informal understandings and arrangements provide needed flexibility to cope with nonroutine matters, they facilitate cooperation to a degree that formally defined relationships do not. People who know one another, who have worked together in the past, who have shared in the achievement of a task, and who perhaps have experienced the same crisis are especially likely to develop tacit understandings. If they interact on a continuing basis, they can learn to trust one another and to expect dependability from one another. It can be argued, then, that transactions flow more smoothly and business is conducted more efficiently when a core of insiders form and develop an ongoing relationship. A regime thus involves not just any informal group that comes together to make a decision but an informal yet relatively stable group with access to institutional resources that enable it to have a sustained role in making governing decisions. What makes the group informal is not a lack of institutional connections, but the fact that the group, as a group, brings together institutional connections by an informal mode of cooperation. There is no all-encompassing structure of command that guides and synchronizes everyone’s behavior. There is a purposive coordination of efforts, but it comes about informally, in ways that often depend heavily on tacit understandings. If there is no overarching command structure, what gives a regime coherence? What makes it more than an “ecology of games”?5 The answer is that the regime is purposive, created and maintained as a way of facilitating action. In a very important sense, a regime is empowering. Its supporters see it as a means for achieving coordinated efforts that might not otherwise be realized. A regime, however, is not created or redirected at will. Organizational analysis teaches us that cognition is limited, existing arrangements have staying power, and implementation is profoundly shaped by procedures in place.6 Shrewd and determined leaders can effect purposive change, but only by being attentive to the ways in which existing forms of coordination can be altered or amplified.7

34  PART I    Governance and Political Economy We can think of cities as organizations that lack a conjoining structure of command. There are institutional sectors within which the power of command may be much in evidence, but the sectors are independent of one another.8 Because localities have only weak formal means through which coordination can be achieved, informal arrangements to promote cooperation are especially useful. These informal modes of coordinating efforts across institutional boundaries are what I call “civic cooperation.” In a system of weak formal authority, it holds special importance. Integrated with the formal structure of authority into a suprainstitutional capacity to take action, any informal basis of cooperation is empowering. It enables community actors to achieve cooperation beyond what could be formally commanded. Consider the case of local political machines. When ward politicians learned to coordinate informally what otherwise was mired in institutional fragmentation and personal opportunism, the urban political machine was created and proved to have enormous staying power.9 “Loyalty” is the shorthand that machine politicians used to describe the code that bound them into a cohesive group.10 The political machine is in many ways the exemplar of governance in which informal arrangements are vital complements to the formal organization of government. The classic urban machines brought together various elements of the community in an informal scheme of exchange and cooperation that was the real governing system of the community. The urban machine, of course, represents only one form of regime. In considering Atlanta, I am examining the governing coalition in a nonmachine city. The term “governing coalition” is a way of making the notion of regime concrete. It makes us face the fact that informal arrangements are held together by a core group-typically a body of insiders-who come together repeatedly in making important decisions. Thus, when I refer to the governing coalition in Atlanta, I mean the core group at the center of the workings of the regime. To talk about a core group is not to suggest that they are of one mind or that they all represent identical interests-far from it. “Coalition” is the word I use to emphasize that a regime involves bringing together various elements of the community and the different institutional capacities they control. “Governing,” as used in “governing coalition,” I must stress, does not mean rule in command-and-control fashion. Governance through informal arrangements is about how some forms of coordination of effort prevail over others. It is about mobilizing efforts to cope and to adapt; it is not about absolute control. Informal arrangements are a way of bolstering (and guiding) the formal capacity to act, but even this enhanced capacity remains quite limited. Having argued that informal arrangements are important in a range of circumstances, not just in cities, let me return to the specifics of the city

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setting. After all, the important point is not simply that there are informal arrangements; it is the particular features of urban regimes that provide the lenses through which we see the Atlanta experience. For cities, two questions face us: (1) Who makes up the governing coalition-who has to come together to make governance possible? (2) How is the coming together accomplished? These two questions imply a third: What are the consequences of the who and how? Urban regimes are not neutral mechanisms through which policy is made; they shape policy. To be sure, they do not do so on terms solely of the governing coalition’s own choosing. But regimes are the mediating agents between the ill-defined pressures of an urban environment and the making of community policy. The who and how of urban regimes matter, thus giving rise to the further question of with what consequences. These three questions will guide my analysis of Atlanta.

Urban Regimes As indicated above, an urban regime refers to the set of arrangements by which a community is actually governed. Even though the institutions of local government bear most of the formal responsibility for governing, they lack the resources and the scope of authority to govern without the active support and cooperation of significant private interests. […] The informal arrangements through which governing decisions are made differ from community to community, but everywhere they are driven by two needs: (1) institutional scope (that is, the need to encompass a wide enough scope of institutions to mobilize the resources required to make and implement governing decisions) and (2) cooperation (that is, the need to promote enough cooperation and coordination for the diverse participants to reach decisions and sustain action in support of those decisions). The mix of participants varies by community, but that mix is itself constrained by the accommodation of two basic institutional principles of the American political economy: (1) popular control of the formal machinery of government and (2) private ownership of business enterprise.11 Neither of these principles is pristine. Popular control is modified and compromised in various ways, but nevertheless remains as the basic principle of government. Private ownership is less than universal, as governments do own and operate various auxiliary enterprises from mass transit to convention centers. Even so, governmental conduct is constrained by the need to promote investmentactivity in an economic arena dominated by private ownership. This politicaleconomy insight is the foundation for a theory of urban regimes.12 In defining an urban regime as the informal arrangements through which public bodies and private interests function together to make’ and carry out governing decisions, bear in mind that I did not specify that the private interests are business interests. Indeed, in practice, private interests are

36  PART I    Governance and Political Economy not confined to business figures. Labor-union officials, party functionaries, officers in non-profit organizations or foundations, and church leaders may also be involved.13 Why, then, pay particular attention to business interests? One reason is the now well-understood need to encourage business investment in order to have an economically thriving community. A second reason is the sometimes overlooked factor that businesses control politically important resources and are rarely absent totally from the scene. They may work through intermediaries, or some businesses may even be passive because others represent their interests as property holders, but a business presence is always part of the urban political scene. Although the nature of business involvement extends from the direct and extensive to the indirect and limited, the economic role of businesses and the resources they control are too important for these enterprises to be left out completely. With revived interest in political economy, the regime’s need for an adequate institutional scope (including typically some degree of business involvement) has received significant attention. However, less has been said about the regime’s need for cooperation-and the various ways to meet it.14 Perhaps some take for granted that, when cooperation is called for, it will be forthcoming. But careful reflection reminds us that cooperation does not occur simply because it is useful. Robert Wiebe analyzed machine politics in a way that illustrates an important point: “The ward politician…required wider connections in order to manage many of his clients’ problems… Therefore clusters of these men allied to increase their bargaining power in city affairs. But if logic led to an integrated city-wide organization, the instinct of self-preservation did not. The more elaborate the structure, the more independence the ward bosses and area chieftains lost.”15 Cooperation can thus never be taken as a given; it must be achieved and at significant costs. Some of the costs are visible resources expended in promoting cooperation-favors and benefits distributed to curry reciprocity, the effort required to establish and maintain channels of communication, and responsibilities borne to knit activities together are a few examples. But, as Wiebe’s observation reminds us, there are less visible costs. Achieving cooperation entails commitment to a set of relationships, and these relationships limit independence of action. If relationships are to be ongoing, they cannot be neglected; they may even call for sacrifices to prevent alienating allies. Forming wider connections is thus not a cost-free step, and it is not a step that community actors are always eager to take. Because centrifugal tendencies are always strong, achieving cooperation is a major accomplishment and requires constant effort. Cooperation can be brought about in various ways. It can be induced if there is an actor powerful enough to coerce others into it, but that is a rare occurrence, because power

CHAPTER 1   The Pillars of American Urban Scholarship in a Global Age   37

is not usually so concentrated. More often, cooperation is achieved by some degree of reciprocity. The literature on collective action focuses on the problem of cooperation in the absence of a system of command. For example, the “prisoner’s dilemma” game instructs us that noncooperation may be invited by a number of situations.16 In the same vein, Mancur Olson’s classic analysis highlights the free-rider problem and the importance of selective incentives in inducing cooperation.17 Alternatively, repeated interactions permit people to see the shortcomings of mutual noncooperation and to learn norms of cooperation.18 Moreover, although Robert Axelrod’s experiments with tit for tat computer programs indicate that cooperation can be instrumentally rational under some conditions, the process is not purely mechanical.19 Students of culture point to the importance of common identity and language in facilitating interaction and promoting trust.20 Size of group is also a consideration, affecting the ease of communication and bargaining among members; Michael Taylor, for example, emphasizes the increased difficulty of conditional cooperation in larger groups.21 What we can surmise about the urban community is thus two fold: (1) cooperation across institutional lines is valuable but far from automatic; and (2) cooperation is more likely to grow under some circumstances than others. This conclusion has wide implications for the study of urban politics. For example, much of the literature on community power has centered on the question of control, its possibilities and limitations: to what extent is domination by a command center possible and how is the cost of social control worked out. The long-standing elitist-pluralist debate centers on such questions. However, my line of argument here points to another way of viewing urban communities; it points to the need to think about cooperation, its possibilities and limitations- not just any cooperation, but cooperation of the kind that can bring together people based in different sectors of a community’s institutional life and that enables a coalition of actors to make and support a set of governing decisions. The study of urban regimes is thus a study of who cooperates and how their cooperation is achieved across institutional sectors of community life. Further, it is an examination of how that cooperation is maintained when confronted with an ongoing process of social change, a continuing influx of new actors, and potential break-downs through conflict or indifference. Regimes are dynamic, not static, and regime dynamics concern the ways in which forces for change and forces for continuity play against one another. For example, Atlanta’s governing coalition has displayed remarkable continuity in the post-World War II period, and it has done so despite deepseated forces of social change. Understanding Atlanta’s urban regime involves understanding how cooperation can be maintained and continuity can prevail in the face of so many possibilities for conflict.

38  PART I    Governance and Political Economy

Structure, Action, and Structuring Because of the interplay of change and continuity, urban regimes are perhaps best studied over time. Let us, then, take a closer look at historical analysis. Scholars make sense out of the particulars of political and social life by thinking mainly in terms of abstract structures such as democracy and capitalism. Although these are useful as shorthand, the danger in abstractions is that they never capture the full complexity and contingency of the world. Furthermore, “structure” suggests something solid and unchanging, yet political and social life is riddled with contradictions and uncertainties that give rise to an ongoing process of change and adjustment. Much of the change that occurs is at the margins of basic and enduring relationships, making it easy to think in terms of order and stability. Incrementalists remind us that the present is the best predictor of the near future. But students of history, especially those accustomed to looking at longer periods of time, offer a different perspective. They see a world undergoing change, in which various actors struggle over what the terms of that change will be. It is a world shaped and reshaped by human efforts, a world that never quite forms a unified whole. In historical light, social structures are less solid and less fixed than social scientists have sometimes assumed. Charles Tilly has argued that there is no single social structure. Instead, he urges us to think in terms of multiple structures, which “consist of shifting, constructed social relations among limited numbers of actors.”22 Philip Abrams also sees structures as relationships, relationships that are socially fabricated and subject to purposive modification.23 Structures are real but not fixed. Action does not simply occur within the bounds set by structures but is sometimes aimed at the structures themselves, so that a process of reshaping is taking place at all times. Abrams thus argues that events have a two-sided character, involving both structure and action in such a way that action shapes structures and structures shape actions. Abrams calls for the study of a process he labels as “structuring,” by which he means that events occur in a structured context and that events help reshape structure.24 […] Events are the arena in which the struggle between change and continuity is played out, but they are neither self-defining nor free-formed phenomena. They become events in our minds because they have some bearing on structures that help shape future occurrences. It is the interplay of event and structure that is especially worthy of study. To identify events, one therefore needs to have some conception of structure. In this way, the researcher can focus attention, relieved of the impossible task of studying everything. There is no escaping the necessity of the scholar’s imposing some form of analysis on research. The past becomes known through the concepts we apply. Abrams sees this as the heart of historical sociology: “The reality of the

CHAPTER 1   The Pillars of American Urban Scholarship in a Global Age   39

past is just not ‘there’ waiting to be observed by the resurrectionist historian. It is to be known if at all through strenuous theoretical alienation.”25 He also reminds us that many aspects of an event cannot be observed in a direct sense; too much is implicit at any given moment.26 That is why the process, or the flow of events over time, is so important to examine. That is also why events are not necessarily most significant for their immediate impact; they may be more significant for their bearing on subsequent events, thus giving rise to modifications in structure.

Prologue to the Atlanta Narrative Structuring in Atlanta is a story in which race is central. If regimes are about who cooperates, how, and with what consequences, one of the remarkable features of Atlanta’s urban regime is its biracial character. How has cooperation been achieved across racial lines, particularly since race is often a chasm rather than a bridge? Atlanta has been governed by a biracial coalition for so long that it is tempting to believe that nothing else was possible. Yet other cities followed a different pattern. At a time when Atlanta prided itself on being “the city too busy to hate,” Little Rock, Birmingham, and New Orleans pursued die-hard segregation and were caught up in racial violence and turmoil. The experience of these cities reminds us that Atlanta’s regime is not simply an informal arrangement through which popular elections and private ownership are reconciled, but is deeply intertwined with race relations, with some actors on the Atlanta scene able to overcome the divisive character of race sufficiently to achieve cooperation. Atlanta’s earlier history is itself a mixed experience, offering no clear indication that biracial cooperation would emerge and prevail in the years after World War II. In 1906, the city was the site of a violent race riot apparently precipitated by inflammatory anti-black newspaper rhetoric.27 The incident hastened the city’s move toward the economic exclusion and residential segregation of blacks, their disenfranchisement, and enforcement of social subordination; and the years after 1906 saw the Jim Crow system fastened into place. Still, the riot was followed by modest efforts to promote biracial understanding, culminating in the formation in 1919 of the Commission on Interracial Cooperation. Atlanta, however, also became the headquarters city for a revived Ku Klux Klan. During the 1920s, the Klan enjoyed wide support and was a significant influence in city elections. At this time, it gained a strong foothold in city government and a lasting one in the police department.28 In 1930, faced with rising unemployment, some white Atlantans also founded the Order of Black Shirts for the express purpose of driving blacks out of even menial jobs and replacing them with whites. Black Shirt protests had an impact, and opportunities for blacks once again were constricted. At the

40  PART I    Governance and Political Economy end of World War II, with Atlanta’s black population expanding beyond a number that could be contained in the city’s traditionally defined black neighborhoods, another klanlike organization, the Columbians, sought to use terror tactics to prevent black expansion into previously all-white areas. All of this occurred against a background of state and regional politics devoted to the subordination of blacks to whites—a setting that did not change much until the 1960s. Nevertheless, other patterns surfaced briefly from time to time. In 1932, Angelo Herndon, a black Communist organizer, led a mass demonstration of white and black unemployed protesting a cutoff of work relief. Herndon was arrested, and the biracial following he led proved short-lived. Still, the event had occurred, and Atlanta’s city council did in fact accede to the demand for continued relief.29 In the immediate postwar period, a progressive biracial coalition formed around the successful candidacy of Helen Douglas Mankin for a congressional seat representing Georgia’s fifth district. That, too, was short-lived, as ultra-conservative Talmadge forces maneuvered to reinstitute Georgia’s county-unit system for the fifth district and defeat Mankin with a minority of the popular vote.30 It is tempting to see the flow of history as flux, and one could easily dwell on the mutable character of political alignments. The Atlanta experience suggests that coalitions often give expression to instability. Centrifugal forces are strong, and in some ways disorder is a natural state. What conflict does not tear asunder, indifference is fully capable of wearing away. The political incorporation of blacks into Atlanta’s urban regime in tight coalition with the city’s white business elite is thus not a story of how popular control and private capital came inevitably to live together in peace and harmony. It is an account of struggle and conflict-bringing together a biracial governing coalition at the outset, and then allowing each of the coalition partners to secure for itself an advantageous position within the coalition. In the first instance, struggle involved efforts to see that the coalition between white business interests and the black middle class prevailed over other possible alignments. In the second instance, there was struggle over the terms of coalition between the partners; thus political conflict is not confined to “ins” versus “outs.” Those on the inside engage in significant struggle with one another over the terms on which cooperation will be maintained, which is one reason governing arrangements should never be taken for granted. Atlanta’s urban regime therefore appears to be the creature of purposive struggle, and both its establishment and its maintenance call for a political explanation. The shape of the regime was far from inevitable, but rather came about through the actions of human agents making political choices. Without extra-economic efforts by the city’s business leadership, Atlanta would have been governed in a much different manner, and Atlanta’s urban

CHAPTER 1   The Pillars of American Urban Scholarship in a Global Age   41

regime and the policies furthered by that regime might well have diverged from the path taken. History, perhaps, is as much about alternatives not pursued as about those that were. …

Urban Political Order as a Needed Refinement to Regime Analysis Although there is much in the original regime analysis to hold onto— multicausation (which calls for studying the conjunction of factors rather than attempting to isolate a key variable), the central place of resources, the necessity of coalition-building, and a major role for purpose and agenda—I acknowledge that something more is needed. The concept of an urban regime today seems insufficiently expansive to capture all that is important. In particular, any expectation that inquiry will likely find a stable and cohesive governing coalition is outdated. Governing has become more diffuse and fragmented than was common in the period of redevelopment with its clear priority backed by ample federal funding. With political change in mind, I have turned to the idea of an urban political order—not as a static arrangement but as a cluster of evolving relationships anchored in the city and extending into an intergovernmental dimension and reflecting an ongoing process of globalization. Like regime analysis, the concept of an urban political order retains the idea of a political whole and focuses on the way it holds together and how its tensions are manifested. As a concept, urban political order is intended to have room for cross-time comparisons as well as those across cities. An urban political order is especially useful for thinking about governing in the city as a multitiered process.31 The term “multitiered” calls attention to the significantly different layers of concurrent activity in the governance of cities32: (1) setting a priority agenda, dominated by elite actors with substantial resources; (2) making minor adjustments in established policies and practices, typically the scope of activity that is engaged by a city’s broad middle strata, who control modest resources—modest but also adequate to encompass a capacity to exit by moving to a different location within the metropolitan region; and (3) confronting circumstances of pronounced disadvantage by marginal populations, who have command of only meager resources far short of what is needed to alter the conditions that disadvantage them.33 These three tiers of activity impinge on one another, but only rarely is impingement a matter of making an intentional effort to reshape crosssector relationships. While separate tiers provide a way of tracing a trajectory over time, for understanding the full scope of change in an urban political order it is necessary to first look very broadly at the city’s social–economic context. We can do that best not by listing particulars but by observing

42  PART I    Governance and Political Economy how the earlier period of redevelopment differs from the current time in the underlying character of urban transition in process. In short, how has the basic context shifted? After answering this question, we can consider the way such a change gives rise to far-reaching political and policy consequences. Let us begin with what earlier became the conventional understanding of the urban crisis. Coming out of Second World War, city leaders faced the challenge of coping with the decline of the industrial city and to respond to massive suburban growth. A shift from rail- to automotive-centered transportation fundamentally altered land use, and through expressway construction and urban renewal, redevelopment became the priority agenda promoted by a business–city hall alliance and heavily funded by federal grants. Combined with the Great Migration (in which African-Americans were excluded from the suburbs), displacement profoundly affected both middle- and lower-class neighborhoods, and reinforced a federally subsidized exit to the suburbs by the white middle class. By the time that weak, federal antidiscrimination legislation on housing was enacted in 1968, a pattern of affluent white suburbs and black poverty concentrated in the city was already firmly in place. Widespread outbreaks of civil disorder deepened the pattern. Redlining, predatory lending, and blockbusting fed widespread disinvestment in city neighborhoods. A scattering of voluntary efforts sought to counter the emerging pattern, but in the absence of governmental action at all levels, they proved ineffective. City services, especially education, failed to adjust and fed a broad process of decline and social damage. Redevelopment thus yielded a priority agenda of economic restructuring, a middle-class response centered in exit, and a lower-strata population essentially neglected and disregarded. A shifting racial demography and a brief flurry of Great Society initiatives opened the way to a modest policy adjustment, namely, public employment for AfricanAmericans, which provided a foothold for a growing black middle class. As the redevelopment period ended (ca. 1980), city decline and suburban growth had turned national policy and politics rightward. City problems faded from the limelight in presidential campaigns, and the suburban middle class became the gravitational center of American politics. Except for a racially tilted War on Drugs (Alexander 2012), city-oriented programs funded by the federal government found themselves in decline and antitax forces were on the rise.34 In brief, this sketch first identifies the context within which Atlanta’s biracial coalition became that city’s governing arrangement, and with significant local variations on this major theme,35 it formed the broad context for the construction and operation of urban regimes in Atlanta and elsewhere. Second, the sketch points to an eventual shift in the national political context with profound intergovernmental implications. Over time, with an evolving global economy, a significant shift has occurred in what faces urban America. Whereas the overriding consideration

CHAPTER 1   The Pillars of American Urban Scholarship in a Global Age   43

in the redevelopment period was land use as a mode of bringing about economic restructuring, the postindustrial city has moved human capital into prominence. The underlying character of urban change has become less a matter of physical reconstruction and more a matter of people considerations. In a knowledge and information age, both school reform and the cultivation and attraction of what has become known as the creative class (Florida 2003) have assumed center stage. Land use remains a major factor, but now the question is the extent to which cities are experiencing “the great inversion”— the gravitation of a younger and more affluent population to the city.36 As the collective corporate stake in the economic vitality of downtown has weakened with the transition away from the industrial city now an accomplished fact and the global mobility of business executives a reality, Salisbury’s “new convergence of power” has aged and eroded. In many cities, the upper tier of movers and shakers has become less engaged and civic leadership has become more diffuse. Priority setting is now rarely a matter of fixing a strategic direction backed by a stable circle of top leaders; it seems more often a matter of ad hoc initiatives based on opportunistic assemblages of resources (Stone, Stoker, et al., forthcoming). For many cities, with collective business leadership now largely in remission, long-term strategic planning by the business sector has given way to piecemeal, short-term pursuits of profit.37 The “ed and med” sector is in ascendance, but not typically as a collective force. Philanthropic foundations have become more substantial players in larger cities, but collaboration within this sector is highly uneven. Nationally, a few billionaire philanthropists have deployed their wealth strategically to promote a corporate version of urban school reform (Reckhow 2013).38 Local leaders in several cities have given priority to education, but federal and state initiatives are the primary source of the high level of attention urban school reform now enjoys. Overall, though the composition of local elites has undergone change, they remain a significant if less constant force. Priority setting lacks the clear and consistent character it had during the redevelopment period. With seldom a fixed “go to” body in place, the exercise of power has become less steady, and its institutional base lacks the kind of convergence that Salisbury identified in the redevelopment period. Below the top tier change is also substantial. With the “great inversion” in operation, portions of the middle strata have forsaken relentless sprawl for gentrification.39 Whereas the redevelopment era conflicts featured battles between middle-strata whites in retreat and a unified (sometimes uneasily so) black community asserting its claims with demography at its back, the present time sees the newly enlarged black middle class (itself now increasingly suburban but its own return to the city also in evidence) defending its tenuous hold without demography on its side and with public-sector employment under multiple pressures. Immigration is the dominant demographic factor.

44  PART I    Governance and Political Economy For the lower class, where disinvestment and abandonment in housing were once an overarching threat, now we see the rise of a movement claiming a “right to the city” to counter the threat of displacement (Leavitt, Samara, and Brady 2009; Purcell 2014). Immigration and multiethnicity pose major challenges to any cohesive force from the lower ranks of the social order.40 Yet, spearheaded by foundation-supported organizations like LAANE (Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy), locally based coalitions have achieved some remarkable concession and community benefits agreements (JonesCorrea and Wong, forthcoming; Meyerson 2013; Stuart 2010). With pressure from community- and labor-based organizations, several cities have enacted living-wage ordinances (Milkman, Bloom, and Narro 2010). Aided by highly sympathetic coverage from local newspapers in Los Angeles, SEIU (Service Employees International Union) conducted a successful campaign, Justice for Janitors, to organize workers in the city’s hotel industry and reverse a decline in wages (Bridges 2011).41 In contrast with the disregard urban neighborhoods once experienced, cities as diverse as Seattle, Phoenix, and Nashville have established robust departments of neighborhood affairs.42 With universities, medical schools, and their hospitals assuming a large place in many cities, university–community relationships are undergoing changes. Although significant points of friction remain, several universities have made efforts to establish a constructive relationship with lower-income residents in surrounding neighborhoods.43 In some cities, foundations have also become important backers of community development in disadvantaged neighborhoods.44 The conclusion to be drawn from the various instances cited above is not that lower-strata groups have emerged as a major power in the governance of cities. They remain politically marginal, but less unremittingly so than was the case in the redevelopment era. Partly this is a matter that elite-tier players are more diverse than in past times. For instance, as in the case of the Dudley Street Initiative in Boston, the philanthropic sector can give otherwise disadvantaged groups a heightened presence in a city’s political milieu. The more fluid structure of power makes possible alliances and a level of negotiations rarely found in the years following the Second World War (Stone, Stoker, et al., forthcoming). Neglect in addressing burgeoning problems and the social damage that redevelopment bequeathed to cities means that the task of social reconstruction is enormous, and no Salisbury-type body of convergent power wielders is in place or even in prospect to take on such an effort. Nor, except in small bits and pieces, is federal funding for such an undertaking in the offing. Local action is thus potentially the main determinant of whatever social reconstructions takes shape. Comparison with the redevelopment period tells us that governing the city today has greater fluidity than in the past. Nevertheless, while local action can claim significance, it takes place within a context of structural inequality and highly scarce resources.

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Urban Political Order as a Framework for Cross-Time Comparison What to make of the above sketch of changes? The cross-time comparison described above does two things. As already indicated, it shows first that expectations of finding a governing coalition stable and cohesive enough to pursue an ambitious agenda are outdated. We are in a different era. Today’s top elites lack the drive to come together behind a high-priority program of action, and there is sparse federal money for backing anything on the scale of a campaign for the social reconstruction of the city. Second, the cross-time comparison shows that despite various changes, structural inequality extends from the previous period to the present time. What are the implications of these two points? A major challenge to regime analysis has come from scholars who see capitalist development as the defining context for city politics. With its own treatment of local activity, how well can the concept of an urban political order hold up against insistence that capitalism is the central fact of modern life? After all is said and done, is structural inequality under capitalism the final word? It is no doubt a very large consideration, but is a top-down view of an unfolding capitalism all that is needed? I think not, and, in any case, I do not confine structural inequality to economic class and exclude race and other noneconomic factors.45 To move away from a deterministic view, think of structural inequality as a prevailing wind. Such a wind has profound consequences, but it is possible to build shelters and plant trees as a windbreak. With this analogy in mind, the authors of the forthcoming In a New Era offer an alternative to structural determinism (Stone, Stoker, et al., forthcoming). Designed to stress the importance of intermediate factors, this view draws inspiration from works by Cathy J. Cohen (1999) and Mario Luis Small (2004), with collateral support from Mary Pattillo’s (2007) focus on racial brokers and middle-range players. These works highlight space within which adjustments can take place…. …As the capacity to define and pursue a broad redevelopment agenda once accorded high priority has ebbed into a more diffuse pattern of power, does this trend mean that pluralism is vindicated after all? Two considerations militate against any such conclusion. One is that systemic factors stand in the way of level ground for the formation of coalitions. A stratified distribution of resources makes the construction of some alignments more difficult than others (Stone 1980). In this way, market inequalities and social hierarchies penetrate political relationships, and they work against a level playing field.46 The second consideration revolves around a point about power made in Regime Politics. A capacity to govern by pursuing a broad, priority-accorded agenda has to be constructed and maintained; it is never a given. The decline

46  PART I    Governance and Political Economy of one such capacity does not mean that another of comparable strength will take its place. Moreover, while diffusion of power makes for a more fluid situation, players with substantial resources find it easier to navigate those waters than do players with few resources. Just as marginal groups found themselves with little governing voice in the redevelopment era, they face that possibility as well in the current postindustrial time. A position set forth in Regime Politics that I maintain with undiminished force is this: “The power struggle concerns, not control and resistance, but gaining and fusing a capacity to act—power to, not power over” (Stone 1989, p. 229, emphasis in original). If anything, the weakening of the convergence of power characteristic of the redevelopment era has made what I term the social-production view of power more compelling. The multitiered conception of a city’s political order thus does not carry with it an assumption that position within this order is locked into place, a conclusion that might follow from structural determinism. Instead, the logic employed here is that as adjustments to an ongoing process of change are made, a capacity to act can be strengthened or weakened. In many places, as the transition to a decentralized, automotive transportation became an accomplished fact, as globalization loosened the connections of corporate business leaders to any given place, and as diminishing federal money left city halls with less wherewithal, the convergence of power characteristic of the redevelopment period weakened. It was not deposed by a grassroots mobilization, but its supporting conditions changed. Significantly, the preemptive reach of the top tier (based around the redevelopment agenda) has become less consequential. The capacity to pursue an agenda of social reconstruction remains to be built, but the room within which it could be built appears more available than it was in the era of redevelopment. With increased emphasis on human capital, the heightened importance of the “ed and med” sector, changing community–police relations, and the “great inversion” underway in many places, old patterns of power have limited footing in the postindustrial city of today. New and more diverse players with their own particular store of resources have entered the scene47 but have done so without a broad, coalescing agenda. The top tier has thus become a less substantial force, and also one with a less coherent focus. Meanwhile, the incentives for the middle-strata population have tilted less toward exit and, in many places, more toward securing the benefits of the city. Furthermore, there is room now both for building fresh grassroots coalitions and for forming top-bottom alliances. None of these activities replicate the convergence of power characteristic of the redevelopment period, but with faith communities sometimes as a base for action and with foundation funding a source of support in many instances, marginal populations find themselves with enhanced opportunities for mobilization. Particularly if they are able to overcome internal divisions of race and other

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social identities, they can “build shelters” against the winds of structural disadvantage (Thompson 2006, p. 250). As Jones-Correa and Wong argue in this colloquy, possibilities of bringing together appreciable initiatives of social reconstruction are feasible. Nevertheless, resource scarcity remains as an ongoing constraint. A few years back, Sapotichne, Jones, and Wolfe (2007) called for moving on from the study of urban regimes as then understood. My response to that call is to update elements of the regime approach by refashioning it around the concept of an urban political order and keeping an eye on issues related to governing the whole polity (cf. Peterson 1981) while continuing to view a city’s governing arrangements as the product of a configuration. In addition, I hold firm to multicausality as a form of explanation. In that way, the “iron law” that resources must be commensurate with the agenda being pursued stays in place even as the structuring of power and the setting of local agendas have become a more diffuse process.

Notes (from first half refer pages 32–40)   1 James G. March, “The Business Firm as a Political Coalition,” Journal of Politics 24 (November 1962): 662-678.   2 Chester I. Barnard, The Functions of the Executive (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968).   3 Oliver E. Williamson, The Economic Institutions of Capitalism (New York: Free Press, 1985).   4 Ibid., 10.   5 See Norton E. Long, “The Local Community as an Ecology of Games,” American Journal of Sociology 64 (November 1958): 251-261.   6 Cf. Graham T. Allison, Essence of Decision (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971).  7 See Philip Selznick, Leadership in Administration (New York: Harper & Row, 1957).  8 Cf. Bryan D. Jones and Lynn W. Bachelor, The Sustaining Hand (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1986).  9 See especially Martin Shefter, “The Emergence of the Political Machine: An Alternative View,” in Theoretical Perspectives on Urban Politics, by Willis D. Hawley and others (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1976). 10 Clarence N. Stone, Robert K. Whelan, and William J. Murin. Urban Policy and Politics in a Bureaucratic Age, 2d ed. (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1986, 104). 11 Stephen L. Elkin, City and Regime in the American Republic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). 12 Ibid. 13 Cf. Jones and Bachelor, The Sustaining Hand, 214-215. 14 But see Elkin, City and Regime; Martin Shefter, Political Crisis/Fiscal Crisis: The Collapse and Revival of New York City (New York: Basic Books, 1985); and Todd Swanstrom, The Crisis of Growth Politics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1985).

48  PART I    Governance and Political Economy 15 Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877-1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967), 10. 16. Russell Hardin, Collective Action (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982); and Michael Taylor, The Possibility of Cooperation (Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 17 Mancur Olson, Jr., The Logic of Collective Action (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965). 18 Hardin, Collective Action. 19 Robert Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation (New York: Basic Books, 1984). 20 Hardin, Collective Action; and David D. Laitin, Hegemony and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986). 21 Taylor, Possibility of Cooperation. 22 Charles Tilly, Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1984), 27. 23 Philip Abrams, Historical Sociology (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1982). For a similar understanding applied to urban politics, see John R. Logan and Harvey L. Molotch, Urban Fortunes (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987). 24 Cf. Anthony Giddens, Central Problems in Social Theory (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1979). 25 Abrams, Historical Sociology, 331. 26 Ibid. 27 Michael L. Porter, “Black Atlanta: An Interdisciplinary Study of Blacks on the East Side of Atlanta, 1890-1930” (Ph.D. diss., Emory University, 1974); Walter White, A Man Called White (New York: Arno Press and the New York Times, 1969); and Dana F. White, “The Black Sides of Atlanta,” Atlanta Historical Journal 26 (Summer/Fall 1982): 199-225. 28 Kenneth T. Jackson, The Ku Klux Klan in the City 1915-1930 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967); and Herbert T. Jenkins, Forty Years on the Force: 19321972 (Atlanta: Center for Research in Social Change, Emory University, 1973). 29 Charles H. Martin, The Angelo Herndon Case and Southern Justice (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1976); Kenneth Coleman, ed., A History of Georgia (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1977), 294; and Writer’s Program of the Works Progress Administration, Atlanta: A City o f the Modern South (St. Clairshores, Mich.: Somerset Publishers, 1973), 69. 30 Lorraine N. Spritzer, The Belle of Ashby Street: Helen Douglas Mankin and Georgia Politics (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1982).

Notes (from second half refer pages 41–47) 31 The term, multitiered, is used here to be distinct from the term, multilevel, often used to refer to the multiple levels of an intergovernmental system. 32 Parallel processing is a familiar term in addressing decision making in distinct policy domains (Baumgartner and Jones 1993). Parallel processing is a term to recognize that policy communities have a degree of autonomy from one another. However, particularly in the urban arena, such autonomy is often quite limited; such policy

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33

34

35

36

37 38

concerns as economic restructuring, housing, transportation, law enforcement, and education tend to variously spill over into one another, thereby making the term parallel processing less useful than it is in the study of congressional policy making, for example. However, as does parallel processing, the concept of a multitier process recognizes that decision making is not a comprehensive matter. This point is strongly suggested in Norton Long’s (1958) classic article on “the local community as an ecology of games.” Policy activity can occur in various tiers often with players in one tier little mindful of action as by players in other tiers. While there are occasional instances of intentional interaction across tiers, such interaction is not the common pattern. The three tiers are not characterized by sharply drawn boundaries. They are best thought of as clusters along a spectrum of differences in resource capacity in relation to ability and incentive to bring about change (this is essentially a restatement of the “iron law”). Hence, the top tier is composed of high-resource actors engaged in the demanding task of pursuing a sustained, priority agenda. Thus, Salisbury’s (1964) “new convergence of power” was about governmental and business elites with command of substantial resources pursuing a big, far-reaching agenda of change. The present time has witnessed decline in cohesion and a more selective engagement among high-resource players. Hence, their situation and scope of activity constitute a step between the top and middle tiers. Resources are adequate to pursue narrow aims, but aims short of a highpriority agenda of broad change. Similarly, there is a space between the middle and lower tier where a few mitigating steps against disadvantage are possible, especially if allies can be enlisted and collective action facilitated (cf. the treatment of marginality in C. J. Cohen 1999). On the importance of variations in access to resources, particularly in the lower tiers of the political order, see Marwell (2007) and DeFilippis (2001). In various sterling studies, urban historians have captured this broad picture. See, for example, McGirr (2001), Self (2003), Kruse (2005), Lassiter (2007), Kruse and Sugrue (2006), and Freund (2007). See the point by Amy Bridges that the alliance in Sunbelt cities focused on annexation and growth on the periphery and thus had little interest in urban renewal but keen interest in expressway construction. Atlanta pursued urban renewal and annexation (see Bayor 2000). The term “the great inversion” is the title of an important book by Alan Ehrenhalt (2013) offering evidence that suburban appeal has peaked and that many central cities are experiencing growth through the attraction of a younger and more affluent population. A “back to the city” movement is widely regarded as underway. See, for example, Hyra (2012) and his earlier The New Urban Renewal (Hyra 2008) as works exploring forces at play in the postindustrial city. Older industrial cities and many small urban places outside the globalization wave find themselves without an inversion trend and continuing to lose population. See, for example, the analysis of San Diego’s evolution in Erie, Kogan, and MacKenzie (2011). See contrasting views of the merits of this practice in Brill (2011) and Ravitch (2010).

50  PART I    Governance and Political Economy 39 Gentrification is a complicated arena of struggle. The literature is vast, but something of the complexity of its dynamics can be seen in the mix of benefits and costs (Freeman 2006), the class tensions within the black community (Pattillo 2007), in the political turbulence surrounding race as a factor in inversion (Hyra 2012), and in the involvement of the faith community (Hankins and Walter 2012). Note also that something as large as the “great inversion” is a mix of changing middle-class tastes and elite actions to encourage a middle-strata return to the city (Ehrenhalt 2013). 40 For a positive outlook, see Rogers (2009), but in education, for example, see the less optimistic findings of Clarke et al. (2006). 41 See as well Gottlieb et al. (2005) and Milkman, Bloom, and Narro (2010). On organizing for immigrant labor rights, see also Gleeson (2008). Much scholarly work on Justice for Janitors and related topics is underway and will populate the urban literature in coming years. 42 See Diers (2004), Sirianni (2009), Dantico and Svara (forthcoming), and Winders (2012). 43 On the University of Pennsylvania, see Rodin (2007) and Etienne (2013); and on Johns Hopkins University and its East Baltimore neighbors, see Stone (2013). More generally, see Perry and Wiewel (2005) and Hodges and Dubb (2012). 44 Although far from widespread practice, there nevertheless are telling examples of how foundation backing can energize community organizing and greatly strengthen the hand of a neighborhood in its relations with city government. Perhaps the best known example is the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative (Clavel 2010; Medoff and Sklar 1994). 45 On the importance of race and how, in the important case of housing, it came to be wrapped in market terms, see Freund (2007). On the use of race-neutral terms but with pronounced racial consequences, see Alexander (2012) and Hayward (2013). 46 As the deep source of inequality, historian Robert Halpern (1995, pp. 228–29) pointed to “the primacy of the marketplace in defining people’s worth,” in “creating and defending boundaries,” and thereby “shaping social relations” in such a way as to weaken “a larger frame of mutual interest.” He elaborates on the lack of an encompassing responsibility, adding that the problem stems from the denial of interdependence between social strata (Halpern 1995, p. 231). Halpern’s work centers on community development. For an illustration of this pattern in operation in the field of education, see Cucchiara (2013). 47 Universities are not new players, but, as eleemosynary institutions, they are complex entities with multiple aims, not a monolithic organization guided by a single overriding aim. As experience indicates, the roles played by an eleemosynary institution can vary over time and, for that matter, from one of its components to another.

References Abrams, Philip. 1982. Historical Sociology. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press. Alexander, Michelle. 2012. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. Revised edition. New York: The New Press.

CHAPTER 1   The Pillars of American Urban Scholarship in a Global Age   51 Bridges, Amy. 2011. “The Sun Also Rises in the West.” In The City Revisited: Urban Theory from Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, edited by Judd Dennis R., Simpson Dick, 79–103. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press. Cohen, Cathy J. 1999. The Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press. Florida, Richard. 2003. The Rise of the Creative Class. St. Louis: Turtleback Books. Jones-Correa Michael, Wong Diane. 2015. “Whose Politics? Reflections on Clarence Stone’s Regime Politics.” Urban Affairs Review 51 (10): 161–70. Leavitt, Jacqueline, Tony Roshan Samara, and Marnie Brady. 2009. “Right to the City: Time to Democratize Urban Governance.” Progressive Planning 181 (Fall): 4-10. Meyerson, Harold. 2013. “L.A. Story.” The American Prospect 24:28–34, 36–39, 41. Milkman, Ruth, Bloom, Joshua, Narro, Victor. 2010. Working for Justice: The L.A. Model of Organizing and Advocacy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press. Pattillo, Mary. 2007. Black on the Block: The Politics of Race and Class in the City. Chicago Univ. of Chicago Press. Peterson, Paul E. 1981. City Limits. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press. Purcell, Mark. 2014. “Possible Worlds: Henri Lefebvre and the Right to the City.” Journal of Urban Affairs 36:141–54. Reckhow, Sarah. 2013. Follow the Money: How Foundation Dollars Change Public School Politics. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press. Salisbury, Robert H. 1964. “Urban Politics: The New Convergence of Power.” Journal of Politics 26:775–97. Sapotichne, Joshua, Jones, Bryan D., Wolfe, Michelle. 2007. “Is Urban Politics a Black Hole? Analyzing the Boundary Between Political Science and Urban Politics.” Urban Affairs Review 43:76–106. Link Small, Mario Luis. 2004. Villa Victoria: The Transformation of Social Capital in a Boston Barrio. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press. Stone, Clarence N. 1980. “Systemic Power in Community Decision Making: A Restatement of Stratification Theory.” American Political Science Review 74:978–90. Stone, Clarence N. 1989. Regime Politics: Governing Atlanta, 1946–1988. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. Stone, Clarence N., Stoker, Robert P. 2015. Urban Neighborhoods in a New Era. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press. Stuart, Forrest. 2010. “From the Shops to the Streets: UNITE HERE Organizing in Los Angeles Hotels.” In Working for Justice: The L.A. Model of Organizing and Advocacy, edited by Milkman Ruth, Bloom Joshua, Narro Victor, 191–210. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press. Thompson, J. Phillip III. 2006. Double Trouble: Black Mayors, Black Communities and the Call for a Deep Democracy. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press. Tilly, Charles. 1984. Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.

52  PART I    Governance and Political Economy

4 Why History (Still) Matters: Time and Temporality in Urban Political Analysis Joel Rast § Recent decades have witnessed renewed enthusiasm for historical research in the social sciences. Scholarship on path dependence, policy feedback, timing and sequence, and punctuated versus incremental change has fueled new debates and produced new theoretical insights into how time and history factor into political and social outcomes (see, e.g., Pierson 1993, 2004; Thelen 2004; Skocpol 1992; Mahoney 2000; Steinmo, Thelen, and Longstreth 1992; Mahoney and Thelen 2010a). This work has done much to clarify why history matters in social scientific investigation. However, it appears to have gone largely unnoticed by most contemporary urban political scientists and sociologists, who are far more likely to focus on the present or the recent past than to pursue genuinely historical approaches. This article examines certain causal mechanisms that operate in time and shows how their application to the study of urban settings can enhance what we know about urban political processes. What some scholars have called the “historic turn” in the social sciences emerged several decades ago against the backdrop of the behavioral revolution of the 1950s and 1960s (McDonald 1996; Bates et al. 1998, 10–11). Behavioralists advocated what they viewed as a more rigorous social science modeled after the natural sciences in which individual human behavior, rather than structures or social processes, would be the focus of investigation (Seidelman and Harpham 1985; Robertson 1993). Collection of survey data, analyzed through increasingly sophisticated statistical techniques, was the preferred method of inquiry. Given the consensus politics of the 1950s and the perception of history, based largely on the U.S. experience, as both efficient and teleological, the focus on present-day individual behavior was understandable. However, the turbulence of the 1960s, particularly the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement, raised new questions about the nature of politics and society (Robertson 1993; Smith 1996). In political science and sociology, a “new institutionalism” with a decidedly historical, structuralist orientation emerged in opposition to the pluralist, ahistorical § Joel Rast, ‘Why History (Still) Matters: Time and Temporality in Urban Political Analysis’, Urban Affairs Review, 48.1, pp. 3–36, copyright © 2012 by SAGE Publications. Reprinted by Permission of SAGE Publications.

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orthodoxy of the time (March and Olsen 1984; Evans, Rueschemeyer, and Skocpol 1985; Katznelson 1992; Immergut 1998; Hall and Taylor 1996). Journals such as Studies in American Political Development, Politics & Society, Social Science History, Journal of Policy History, and Journal of Historical Sociology provided outlets for a new generation of historically minded scholars from the fields of American political development, historical institutionalism, historical sociology, and rational choice theory. In sociology, historical research was institutionalized through the American Sociological Association’s (ASA) new section on Comparative and Historical Sociology, established in 1983. The American Political Science Association (APSA) launched its Politics and History section several years later in 1990. While historical scholarship has never threatened to eclipse the atemporal, variablecentered approaches that have dominated mainstream social scientific inquiry since the postwar years, historical research today nevertheless enjoys widespread visibility across much of the social sciences. Like other parts of the social sciences, the field of urban studies has a rich tradition of historical scholarship. During the interwar years, urban sociologists from the influential Chicago School produced highly contextualized historical case studies to examine poverty, gang activity, transient populations, immigrant culture, and other social phenomena (see Wirth 1928; Zorbaugh 1929; Thrasher 1927; Anderson 1923; Cressey 1932). Following World War II, political scientist Robert Dahl was one of several prominent behavioralists who criticized the ahistorical mood of the times and continued to use historical methods in his own work, including his seminal study of New Haven, Who Governs? (Dahl 1961a, 1961b). Other scholars associated with the community power debate of the 1960s and 1970s likewise developed their arguments through case studies that were, in some instances, deeply historical (see, e.g., Wolfinger 1974; Wildavsky 1964; Gaventa 1980; Katznelson 1981). By the 1980s, a new breed of urban political economists turned to history to help explain the changing position of cities in an increasingly global economy (see Shefter 1985; Swanstrom 1985; Kantor and David 1988; Mollenkopf 1983; Squires 1989; Fainstein et al. 1986). Scholarship on urban regimes, including Clarence Stone’s pathbreaking Regime Politics, also relied frequently on historical investigation to explain postwar patterns of urban governance (see Stone 1989; Elkin 1987; Ferman 1996; DeLeon 1992; DiGaetano and Klemanski 1999). Despite this tradition of historical scholarship, the historic turn observable in many areas of the social sciences today is less evident in the work of urban political scientists and sociologists. During the past decade, only a small percentage of articles published in Urban Affairs Review and City & Community—the official journals of the urban sections of APSA and ASA, respectively—have been genuinely historical. The same holds for the Journal of Urban Affairs, the official journal of the Urban Affairs Association.

54  PART I    Governance and Political Economy Conference papers presented at recent annual meetings of the Urban Affairs Association and within the urban sections of APSA and ASA annual meetings have seldom been historically oriented. Instead, the dominant approaches featured both in key journals and in conference proceedings have been large-N, cross-sectional studies based on surveys or other data sets and case studies focusing on the present or the very recent past. While many excellent historical urban monographs have been published in recent years, the authors of these texts are more likely to be historians than scholars with a self-consciously social scientific orientation.1 As Paul Pierson (2004) has observed, historical explanation in the social sciences can take different forms. For some scholars, history serves mainly as an expanded reservoir of empirical material or “data points” with which to test some model presumed to be valid across time (Sewell 1996, 246; Pierson 2004). In this approach, common among rational choice scholars, the turn to history is inspired principally by the desire to find examples unavailable in the present. In the urban studies literature, regime theorists have sometimes taken this approach (see Rast 2006; Stone and Sanders 1987). For other scholars, it is the particularities of history rather than the ability to generalize that is most interesting. In this approach, common among scholars of American political development, the objective is to develop explanations of puzzling or otherwise noteworthy historical outcomes. As Pierson (2004) argues, such studies have made significant contributions to our understanding of political and social history. However, the relevance of such accounts to contemporary society and the lessons they hold for similarly situated cases are not always clear. A third approach to historical investigation—and the one that is the focus of this essay—centers on the role of time and temporality in explaining social and political outcomes (see Abbott 1998, 2001; Pierson 2004; Isaac 1997; Aminzade 1992). Scholars within this tradition emphasize that many social processes require extended periods of time to “work themselves out” (Sewell 1996, 246). In such cases, atemporal explanations based on crosssectional evidence may produce incomplete or inaccurate accounts. Consider, for example, Clarence Stone’s Regime Politics. The key puzzle to be explained in Stone’s study of postwar Atlanta is the existence of a business-dominated, progrowth regime in a majority–minority city with a strong neighborhood movement. A cross-sectional study focusing on a small sliver of time might have produced evidence consistent with third-face-of-power arguments (Gaventa 1980; Lukes 1974). That is, the consent of neighborhood actors to governing arrangements seemingly inconsistent with their interests might have been interpreted as resulting from ideological manipulation of some kind. However, by focusing on an extended period of time, Stone shows how alignment with the regime created opportunities for opposition groups to accomplish certain goals, causing them to adjust their preferences over time

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and reach an accommodation with the city’s political and economic elites. Consent was genuine, not manufactured. Stone’s “social production” model of power, a key insight of urban regime theory, was the product of historical research examining processes that unfolded over an extended time frame. Historical research that examines processes over time is, of course, nothing new. Karl Marx, Adam Smith, and other founders of the modern social sciences all pursued this approach, and many others have followed their example. More recently, however, scholars have focused on examining and elucidating certain causal mechanisms that can be used to explain more precisely how outcomes are shaped through temporal processes. For example, a growing literature on path dependence and critical junctures argues that the form taken by present-day policies and institutions is, in some instances, highly conditioned by seemingly contingent events in the distant past (Pierson 2000a; Collier and Collier 1991; Mahoney 2000, 2001; Goldstone 1998; Capoccia and Kelemen 2007). A related body of literature on policy feedback has shown how standard accounts treating policies solely as dependent variables may be misleading since policies frequently alter the political landscape over time by shaping the preferences and capacities of political actors (Pierson 1993, 2006; Skocpol 1992; Huber and Stephens 2001; Weir 2006). Other scholars have focused more directly on the timing of historical events or processes relative to one another, emphasizing how outcomes are shaped by the sequences through which events unfold (Pierson 2000b; Hacker 2002; Orren and Skowronek 2004). In this article I examine these mechanisms and processes, along with some others, and demonstrate how they can be used to further our understanding of urban political processes. My focus is on urban governing arrangements in particular, which I define as both formal structures such as policies and institutions and informal structures such as regimes or growth coalitions. I begin with a discussion of path dependence. Next I show how studies in which outcomes are explained by the sequencing of events or processes may in some cases be theoretically specified through path dependence analysis. I then offer some suggestions for how studies of urban temporal processes might engage debates over punctuated versus incremental change in the literature on institutional development. I conclude with a brief discussion of methodology.

Path Dependence Few subjects have garnered more attention from urban scholars over the years than urban governing arrangements. In recent decades, scholars have focused on the role of business and civic leaders in urban governance, often finding evidence of close collaboration between city officials and business and civic elites in governing decisions (Stone 1989; Logan and Molotch

56  PART I    Governance and Political Economy 1987; Molotch 1976). Why do urban governing arrangements take the form they do? Pluralists, Marxists, and, more recently, regime theorists have all relied on functionalist perspectives to address this question. Functionalist approaches explain governing arrangements by the functions they perform, either for a political system itself or for powerful actors (Hall 1986). Pluralists viewed city government as an arena in which competing interests were reconciled and transformed into public policy (Banfield and Wilson 1963). For Marxists, urban governance involved efforts to strike a balance between conflicting pressures of accumulation and legitimation (Hill 1978; Kennedy 1984; O’Connor 1973). Regime theorists view city governance as the product of multi-issue, public–private partnerships (regimes) that can help overcome certain collective action problems (Stone 1989). Scholars aligned with each of these perspectives have often maintained, either explicitly or implicitly, that the functions performed by governing arrangements explain why they exist and take the form they do.2 […] In recent years, scholars seeking to move beyond functionalist explanations of institutional arrangements have frequently relied on some version of path dependence. Loosely defined, path dependence can mean simply that developments in the past have an impact on what happens in the future (Sewell 1996). However, most scholars today apply the concept in a considerably more restricted fashion.3 For example, James Mahoney (2000, 507) defines path dependence as “specifically those historical sequences in which contingent events set into motion institutional patterns or event chains that have deterministic properties.” In this conception, path dependence refers to a distinct type of temporal sequence where outcomes are traced to key choice points, or “critical junctures,” in the distant past. The argument is that multiple trajectories are possible at such decision points. However, once a particular solution (or “path”) is selected, positive feedback processes that tend to reproduce the new arrangements and prevent reversal of the initial choice are activated (Pierson 2004; Levi 1997). This means that even solutions that prove to be less than optimal may become “locked in.” Path dependence approaches have been used by economic historians to explain the triumph of such innovations as the QWERTY typewriter keyboard and the VHS video player over more efficient alternatives (Arthur 1994; David 1985). Others have argued that the development of policies and institutions may have similar path-dependent qualities (North 1990; Pierson 1994). Path dependence perspectives provide a strong counterpoint to functionalist approaches because they suggest that the form taken by governing arrangements may be determined in significant part by temporally remote events that have little or no connection to the functions they currently serve. Path dependence perspectives focus considerable attention on the critical junctures where new trajectories are initiated since outcomes are often linked to such decision points. Typically, critical junctures result from some form of

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cleavage or crisis that disrupts existing arrangements and creates opportunities for innovation and change (Collier and Collier 1991). In contrast to subsequent stages of a path-dependent sequence, where agency is narrowed, critical junctures are viewed as periods of openness and contingency where initial events can have significant long-term impacts. This dynamic is frequently illustrated by the example of the Polya urn (Arthur 1994; Goldstone 1998). Picture a large urn containing four balls, each a different color. The objective is to fill the urn by selecting balls randomly one at a time and replacing them with two additional balls of the same color. During the first several rounds, the final outcome is indeterminate. However, mathematical probability ensures that one color will quickly gain an advantage, causing selections in subsequent rounds to stabilize around an equilibrium. In this example, early events are “remembered” (Pierson 2004, 18). They do not cancel out or disappear over time; to the contrary, early rounds play a decisive role—far greater than later ones—in determining the final outcome. Not all historical sequences are path dependent, but only those where outcomes can be traced to temporally remote, contingent events that are not predicted or explained by existing theories of social or political change (Mahoney 2000). For example, many scholars have argued that the origins of present-day urban regimes date back to the 1940s and 1950s, when problems of disinvestment, White flight, substandard housing, and falling property values threatened the future of cities (Stone 1989; Stone and Whelan 2009; Salisbury 1964; Teaford 1990). To address such problems, business and civic leaders united with city officials to form long-term working partnerships, or “regimes,” focused around urban redevelopment. In most cities, regimes continued to exist long after the crises that brought them into being passed. For contemporary urban regimes to be considered truly path dependent, it must be demonstrated that they have their origins in the critical juncture of the postwar urban crisis (or some other period) and that, in the absence of that set of events, governing arrangements would have taken a different form. Otherwise, regimes might be understood in functionalist rather than historical terms as some sort of equilibrium solution to urban governance problems (see Goldstone 1998). Whether regimes are genuinely path dependent is a question that requires investigation on a case-by-case basis. However, such an argument appears plausible. While business involvement in governance is universal, the form it takes varies, ranging from ad hoc, project-based coalitions with public officials to the sustained, multi-issue partnerships of urban regimes (DiGaetano and Klemanski 1999). Events during the early postwar years favored the latter set of arrangements. Absent those conditions, the motivation of business leaders to commit significant time and resources to a comprehensive rebuilding program would have presumably been weaker. Postwar governing arrangements might have turned out differently, with effects extending well beyond the postwar period.

58  PART I    Governance and Political Economy Of course, governing arrangements forged during critical junctures do not automatically reproduce themselves. Accordingly, literature on path dependence has paid significant attention to mechanisms that sustain particular development trajectories over time once they have been selected. While scholars have identified several such mechanisms, studies that focus on the reproduction of governing arrangements in particular have emphasized policy feedback. Policy feedback refers to the effects of policies on subsequent political activity. Cross-sectional studies generally treat policies as the outcomes of political processes, whether the focus is on policy enactment or some later period. However, scholars examining policy development over time have shown how causality may run in both directions, with policies representing both causes and effects of political mobilization (Hacker 2002; Campbell 2003; Mettler 2005; Huber and Stephens 2001). Policies shape political processes in part by influencing the goals and capabilities of citizens and interest groups, often providing incentives or resources that encourage particular patterns of mobilization (Skocpol 1992; Pierson 1993). In some cases, self-reinforcing processes ensue in which actors benefiting from and empowered by a particular initiative use their enhanced positions to press for its expansion (Mahoney 2000). Expansion of the initiative in turn tends to further empower such groups, increasing their capacity to push for further expansion, and so on. When feedback processes follow this self-reinforcing pattern, policies enacted at critical junctures may eventually become deeply entrenched. Policies may or may not activate such positive feedback loops, and scholars have begun to develop explanations for why outcomes vary along these lines. […] Instead of positive feedback loops, means-tested programs may induce downward participation-policy spirals. Policy feedback can shape the political landscape in ways that can be understood only by examining political processes over extended periods of time. In a provocative study of the evolution of U.S. fair housing and community reinvestment policies, Mara Sidney (2003) shows how the Fair Housing Act of 1968 and the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 both activated coalitions that became forceful advocates for the extension of these laws. National fair housing and civil rights organizations helped secure changes to the Fair Housing Act that strengthened the federal government’s enforcement powers and created a permanent grant program for nonprofits to undertake enforcement activities, increasing the capacity of housing advocates to defend fair housing policies. The Community Reinvestment Act activated similar positive feedback loops as advocacy groups pressed successfully for stronger data disclosure requirements on financial institutions, enabling such groups to more effectively monitor lending activity. As Sidney observes, positive feedback processes have strengthened and extended these policies. At the same time, certain shortcomings built into the original policy designs

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have gone unaddressed, as incentive structures encourage advocates to work “within the frameworks created by the original policies” rather than propose radical changes (Sidney 2003, 151).4 Examples of path dependence or self-reinforcing feedback processes have been identified in various urban settings, although few such studies have focused on urban politics and governance.5 While the application of path dependence perspectives to urban political processes is promising, the concept has not always been applied as clearly and selectively as some scholars have argued it should be. For example, Pallas and Jennings (2010) argue that stability in New York City per-pupil school expenditures from 2000 to 2005 is evidence of path dependence. However, they provide no account of when or how the pattern they identify originated. As such, it is impossible to establish whether spending patterns during the period they analyze were produced by contingent events in the past that triggered self-reinforcing processes—resulting in path dependence—or whether entirely different causal forces were at work. For example, it is conceivable that school expenditures are responsive to demographic changes in community areas, but because such changes often occur relatively slowly and because it may take time for spending patterns to “catch up” to demographic change, expenditures tend to exhibit stability when short periods of time are analyzed. Whatever the cause of the observed outcome, the real point is that because the initial stages of a path-dependent sequence are critical in determining the final outcome, no convincing argument about path dependence can be put forward without careful attention to early events in a temporal sequence. Path dependence arguments have also been criticized for failing to carefully specify the mechanisms that cause institutional or policy arrangements initiated during critical junctures to become entrenched (Thelen 1999). Concepts such as policy feedback and self-reinforcing processes are sometimes used as substitutes rather than tools for actual explanation. For example, in a study of public transportation policies in six European cities, Pflieger et al. (2009, 1423) argue that “existing institutions tend to be perpetuated, becoming self-reinforcing over time. Consequently, the domination of a system of decisions by one or more institutions will tend to endure, authorizing the reproduction of past trends.” The question of how new institutional arrangements are reproduced is never directly answered. Even when mechanisms are more carefully explained, scholars often focus the bulk of their attention more on critical junctures than on the legacies of such events.6 In an insightful analysis of institutional change in Prague after the fall of communism in 1989, Martin Horak (2007) provides a convincing explanation for the failure of the city’s political leaders to craft new institutions fully conducive to democratic change. Against rational choice perspectives that view institutions as equilibrium solutions, Horak argues that the complex and unstable decision-making environment in Prague during the

60  PART I    Governance and Political Economy initial years after the fall of communism encouraged political leaders to seek simple, short-term policy solutions instead of pursuing strategic reforms that might have produced a more well-functioning democracy. On the question of how and why suboptimal policies and institutions were reproduced over time, however, Horak’s analysis is less enlightening. In transportation policy, for example, he blames animosity between civic groups and public officials for the ongoing neglect of public transit in the city’s transportation program. Yet it is unclear why civic groups dissatisfied with the direction of transportation policy could not push successfully for change. Weak public– private cooperation does not imply policy inertia. Finally, arguments about path dependence have sometimes been applied to cases where use of the concept fails to contribute to theoretical understanding of a particular outcome. In a case study of a new stockyards development in Calgary, for example, Ghitter and Smart (2009, 628) trace the location of the project in east Calgary back to the (contingent) decision by Canadian Pacific Railway in 1874 to build its railway station in this part of the city, which “dictated where future industrial development would be located.” The authors characterize the chain of events they describe as path dependent since construction of the railway station set in motion land-use patterns in this portion of the city that became entrenched. While the argument about path dependence is convincing, no sensible person would conclude otherwise. In cases such as this, path dependence serves more as a label than an explanation for why something happened the way it did. It may be more instructive to apply path dependence arguments to developments for which rival theories offer plausible explanations. Policies and institutions are generally easier to change than buildings and infrastructure. Arguments that present-day policies and institutions are deeply conditioned by events in the distant past are less intuitively correct than similar arguments about the built environment. In sum, properly developed studies of path dependence must, at a minimum, do two things. First, they must link outcomes to some type of contingent branching point or critical juncture in the past. As Mahoney (2006, 134–35) observes, the finding of initial contingency is important because distinctive features of path dependence like suboptimality and unpredictability “rely on claims about accidents, small events, and the like at the initiation of path-dependent sequences.” Second, studies of path dependence must carefully explain how the legacy of the hypothesized critical juncture was reproduced over time. In studies of governing arrangements, this typically involves a focus on the mechanisms that sustain a policy, institution, or set of institutional arrangements. Importantly, findings of institutional persistence do not imply an absence of change. Studies of path dependence speak instead of “trajectories” of development, linked to and circumscribed by critical juncture episodes (Pierson 2004, 135; Thelen 2003, 208–9). For example, Sidney’s (2003) analysis of the Fair Housing Act is consistent with

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path dependence explanations because amendments to the law extended and reinforced rather than reframed federal fair housing policy. Had the extension of fair housing policy resulted in change of a more transformative kind, this case would not be a promising candidate for path dependence analysis.

Timing and Sequence In path-dependent sequences, the order in which events unfold matters. Early events in a sequence may have decisive impacts, later ones less so. Scholars of urban political development have long recognized that the timing and sequencing of events or processes may affect outcomes in ways that crosssectional studies focusing on the values of certain variables at a particular moment in time do not capture. A noteworthy example is Ira Katznelson’s (1981) classic study of labor and community politics, City Trenches. For Katznelson, the key puzzle to be explained is the failure of strong socialist, social democratic, or labor parties of the sort that developed in Europe to form in the United States. This phenomenon has been explained by some scholars as the result of America’s liberal tradition and absence of pronounced class divisions (Hartz 1955). However, Katznelson rejects this argument in favor of a more genuinely historical one. According to Katznelson, it was not the absence of a militant working class that made U.S. political cleavages distinctive as the country industrialized but rather the focus of labor militancy on the workplace alone. At home, ethnic, religious, and territorial identifications were dominant, as patronage rather than collective class concerns became the vehicle for incorporating city residents into politics. Importantly, this peculiar system of “city trenches”— which drew a sharp line between the politics of work and the politics of community—resulted from the sequencing of several key events. In the United States, industrialization occurred in a political climate distinguished by voting rights for White working-class males and relatively benign treatment of union activity by the state. By contrast, nineteenth-century European workers were excluded from the franchise on an explicitly class basis and prohibited from organizing. Because democratic reforms there came after the initial period of industrialization, the political demands of nineteenth-century European workers took aim at both capitalists and the state, producing political parties with a self-consciously class orientation. In her study of Progressive Era municipal reform, Amy Bridges (1997) makes a similar argument about the sequencing of events to explain why urban reform movements had greater success in the Southwest than in the older industrial cities where such efforts originated. Like Katznelson, Bridges downplays the role of political culture as a contributing factor. More important, she argues, was the timing of two key processes – the development of strong party organizations and industrialization – and whether they

62  PART I    Governance and Political Economy preceded or followed municipal reform efforts. In the Southwest, where reform came first, the absence of political bosses and patronage linking voters to political machines created openings for reformers that no longer existed in northeastern cities. In addition, the underdeveloped economies of southwestern Progressive Era cities created a receptive climate for the probusiness orientation of reformers, much more so than in the Northeast, where industrialization was already in full swing. The arguments advanced in the above two examples take the following form: If event X precedes events Y and Z, the outcome will be different than if event X follows events Y and Z. In other studies focusing on temporal orderings, it is the intersection of multiple events or processes at a particular point in time that produces the outcome of interest. In such occurrences, which historical sociologists refer to as “conjunctures,” outcomes may diverge radically from the form they would have taken had the conjuncture taken place at a different time or not at all (Mahoney 2000; Aminzade 1992). Douglas Rae (2003, 11) presents such an argument to explain the development of urbanism in the nineteenth-century United States. In what he calls “accidents of urban creation,” Rae argues that the temporal intersection of several key events accounts for the concentrated form urbanism ultimately took. These developments included the emergence of steam as the key power source for manufacturing and the domination of rail for transportation of goods, both of which required the clustering of industry in central locations. Also important were the agricultural revolution and relatively open immigration policies, which together created an abundant urban labor force. According to Rae, “There was nothing inevitable or even predictable about this temporary historical alignment: if God, or nature, should elect to run the same history a thousand times, there is no particularly good reason to expect that the same alignment would recur very often, or at all” (Rae 2003, 17). Many other examples of the impacts of temporal orderings and intersections on important outcomes can be found in the urban politics literature, and such explanations are often convincing. Still, Rae’s characterization of the convergence of multiple sequences as historical “accidents” points to at least one potential trouble spot for such arguments, namely, the difficulty theorizing about outcomes produced in this fashion. In Rae’s account of urban development, we can model each of the individual processes that, combined, caused urbanism in the nineteenth-century United States to assume the form it did. But no explanatory framework can be constructed that would predict the observed outcome itself because the convergence of these separate processes was purely a coincidence of timing. Pierson (2004) makes exactly this point in discussing the challenges of theorizing conjunctures more generally. Depending on the objectives of a particular study, ex post facto explanations of the sort presented by Rae may suffice, but any such

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explanation is unlikely to be useful in predicting future outcomes of interest or illuminating other social processes. Beyond the insight that timing matters, it is unclear exactly what the lessons are.7 On the other hand, where it is possible to construct a system in which different temporal processes are linked in some systematic fashion, there may be greater opportunities to transcend the idiosyncrasies of individual cases and develop propositions that can be applied elsewhere. As Pierson (2004) suggests, path dependence perspectives offer one such possibility given the key role played by temporal orderings in such arguments.8 In a path-dependent sequence, timing matters because initial developments may become self-reinforcing, foreclosing alternative (and, in some cases, more desirable) outcomes that may have otherwise been genuine possibilities. Developments occurring later in a sequence may be far less consequential. This insight has featured prominently in studies whose empirical focus is as divergent as the development of health care policy in the United States and the emergence of authoritarian regimes in Central America (Hacker 2002; Mahoney 2001). Studies such as these have found common theoretical ground through efforts to identify and explicate mechanisms that cause early developments in a historical sequence to become self-reinforcing. Indeed, a key advantage of studies in which arguments about timing and sequence are connected to arguments about path dependence and self-reinforcing processes is that they can build on one another to produce a broader research program. In the urban politics literature, my own work on Milwaukee provides one example of a case in which the ordering of events in a path-dependent sequence plays a decisive role in the observed outcome (see Rast 2009). Following World War II, as most cities were initiating downtown redevelopment programs, Milwaukee oriented its economic development policy instead around industrial development. The city’s new industrial program activated a diverse group of supporters whose advocacy efforts and investment activity encouraged further movement along this trajectory, in the way that studies of policy feedback have described. Selection of the industrial path during this time was a result of the accidental intersection of two key events: the election of a socialist mayor in 1948 unsympathetic to the business community’s downtown redevelopment goals and the passage of federal urban renewal legislation the following year. Using resources provided in part by the federal government’s 1949 Housing Act, the new mayor embarked on a program of land acquisition that would provide badly needed space for industrial expansion.9 Had these two events—new socialist mayor and urban renewal legislation—failed to intersect in time, it is highly unlikely that development policy in Milwaukee would have taken the form it did. For example, if voters had elected a nonsocialist candidate in 1948, chances are good that Milwaukee would have followed the path of most postwar cities and initiated a program of downtown development. Because Milwaukee chose socialism at

64  PART I    Governance and Political Economy the very time that federal resources for urban redevelopment became widely available, the possibility of a downtown rebuilding program was foreclosed. No such program could proceed without an alliance between city hall and the downtown business leadership, and the new mayor indicated early on his distaste for such a partnership. How might Milwaukee’s experience inform other studies of urban governance in which issues of timing and sequence figure prominently? Noteworthy in this case are the mechanisms through which Milwaukee’s industrial strategy, once initiated, was perpetuated over time. Business– government cooperation around industrial policy frequently assumed an ad hoc character, with individual developers or landowners working with the city around specific projects and then disappearing from the policy arena. These partnerships were considerably more fragile and conflict prone than the powerful regimes activated by downtown rebuilding programs elsewhere at the time. Ultimately, they proved to be a weak foundation on which to build a local response to global industrial change, and by the 1980s Milwaukee began serious efforts to reorient its development policy around the city’s downtown. The Milwaukee experience thus illustrates how the long-term prospects for those arriving first may differ from case to case. Future contributions might focus both on the mechanisms that sustain path-dependent sequences and what Thelen (2000, 103) describes as “the ‘fit’ between the organizational forms that develop and the political and economic context in which they emerge.” This may better reveal why certain early arrivers are able to translate initial advantages into lasting success, while others appear to lose momentum over time.

Continuity and Change In path dependence explanations of policy and institutional development, history is important because contemporary outcomes are directly traceable to contingent events in the distant past. Unlike functionalist or certain power-distributional accounts, where history matters less than current power configurations, path dependence perspectives emphasize the “stickiness” of inherited institutional arrangements resulting from policy feedback and other mechanisms that cause policies and institutions, once created, to become self-reinforcing. Path dependence perspectives conform to a logic of institutional development consistent with punctuated equilibrium models of change (Baumgartner and Jones 1993; Pierson 2004; Mahoney 2010). Under this view, the emphasis is on long periods of institutional stability, occasionally disrupted by brief episodes of openness and contingency where change is possible. Meaningful change is largely confined to such periods, since institutional innovation ultimately triggers feedback processes that result in the faithful reproduction of new institutional arrangements until the next

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break point occurs (Pierson 2004). As Thelen (2003, 209) describes, “The implication is that institutions, once created, either persist or break down in the face of some kind of exogenous shock.” Change in this model is abrupt and discontinuous, involving the wholesale replacement of one set of policies or institutions with another. Path dependence approaches to institutional development have provided convincing empirical evidence of punctuated change while usefully drawing attention to the ways in which outcomes are shaped by time and history (Mahoney 2001; Pierson 1994; Hacker 2002; Huber and Stephens 2001). At the same time, certain shortcomings of path dependence perspectives have received growing attention in the literature. Thelen (1999, 2000, 2003, 2004) in particular has argued that the emphasis on punctuated change in path dependence approaches has obscured important ways that policies and institutions evolve incrementally, short of breakdown and replacement. Change of this nature occurs in part because the forging of new governing arrangements is a politically contested process in which the losers in one round do not necessarily disappear. As Thelen (1999, 385) suggests, “[T]heir adaptation [to new institutional arrangements] can mean something very different from embracing and reproducing the institution,” as the concept of policy feedback often implies. Instead, it may involve efforts to enlist policies and institutions in the service of new, potentially subversive goals not envisioned by institutional designers. Importantly, such developments contribute to institutional survival by bringing institutions in line with changes in political and economic conditions. Over time, incremental change may add up to major transformations in the roles and functions of policies and institutions, yet such developments are largely invisible in the punctuated approach of path dependence perspectives, where the emphasis is on stability and institutional reproduction. Thelen and others caution against overuse of the path dependence concept, arguing that change frequently occurs in more incremental ways (see Mahoney and Thelen 2010a; Streek and Thelen 2005).10 Similar arguments could be made about contemporary theories of urban governance. For example, the emphasis of urban regime theory, like path dependence perspectives, is on continuity rather than change in governing arrangements. In Stone’s (1989) formulation of regime analysis, regime change is a rare occurrence because regimes have self-reinforcing properties of the sort emphasized by path dependence theorists. By establishing a structure for the massing of resources around a concrete set of objectives, regimes create opportunities to accomplish goals in an otherwise fragmented policy environment. Once in place, regimes exert a kind of gravitational pull in which the ability to attract new participants increases as regime capacity increases. Opposition tends to be costly for challenge groups, not for the regime, since noncooperation may result in little more than exclusion from a productive enterprise. As Stone (1989, 229) describes it, “Those who are

66  PART I    Governance and Political Economy results-oriented generally adjust their agendas to pursue the opportunities compatible with that situation; they ‘go along’ rather than sign up for a long-term struggle to reconstitute the regime.” Certainly regimes have tremendous staying power. Yet what about political change that falls short of regime change? While contemporary urban regimes date back to the postwar period, few would deny that urban governing arrangements today frequently differ in fundamental ways from their postwar counterparts. Regime theory is far more effective in explaining continuity than accounting for the significant changes that have occurred in urban policies and institutions since World War II. In Stone’s formulation, actors disadvantaged by regimes appear to have only two choices: “go along” with current arrangements or press for regime change. As suggested above, however, actors may also push for policy shifts within existing regimes, resulting in something less than regime change but something more than simple regime continuity. By conceptualizing meaningful change as punctuated (regime breakdown and replacement) rather than incremental, regime studies, like path dependence perspectives, have often failed to comprehend important ways that governing arrangements evolve over time. How might studies of urban political development be reoriented to more effectively capture both change and continuity in urban governing arrangements? Recent literature from the fields of historical institutionalism and comparative politics on institutional evolution offers some suggestions. In this literature, policies and institutions are viewed not simply as constraints that channel behavior in predictable ways, but as resources for strategic action that afford opportunities for creative human agency (Thelen 2004; Streek and Thelen 2005; Mahoney and Thelen 2010a). This is so for two principal reasons. First, as argued above, the development of new policies and institutions typically involves negotiation and compromise among various groups with competing interests and divergent goals. Legislative ambiguities resulting from the need to satisfy multiple conflicting interests can be exploited by actors seeking to realign policies or institutions more directly with their own goals and objectives (Schickler 2001; Palier 2005). Second, even if legislative processes were less contested, policies and institutions would still provide space for strategic action because no rule can be designed to anticipate the full range of situations to which it may ultimately be applied. By necessity, policies and institutions contain some built-in flexibility. As Mahoney and Thelen (2010b, 14) argue, the “soft spots” between rules and their interpretation and enforcement are sites for ongoing political contestation that may steer institutions in directions completely unanticipated by their designers. […] If transformative change is not simply punctuated but also incremental, as in the above example, what are the mechanisms through which incremental change occurs? Mahoney and Thelen (2010b) identify four: displacement, layering, conversion, and drift. Displacement refers to the replacement of existing rules with new ones, a process that can happen

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abruptly, as in punctuated equilibrium models, but may also take place more gradually. For example, many cities introduced institutional reforms during the early twentieth century designed to eliminate political machines. However, machine governments frequently remained in place for decades following reform by successfully adapting to new rules and institutions (DiGaetano 1991). Displacement was a gradual process in which defenders of the existing system were able to coexist alongside new rules for a significant length of time. Layering involves the addition of new rules to existing ones as a way of altering the stable reproduction of an existing system and steering it in a new direction. Typically, layering occurs when actors are dissatisfied with an existing policy or institution but lack the power to dismantle it. For example, rather than directly attacking public school systems, a politically untenable strategy, proponents of school choice programs have instead built parallel institutions that compete directly with public schools (Mahoney and Thelen 2010b). To the extent that large numbers of public school students defect to choice schools, the stable reproduction of public school systems is threatened. Conversion refers to the redirection of policies or institutions to new goals, functions, or purposes not envisioned by institutional designers. When actors successfully exploited ambiguities in the 1949 Housing Act to emphasize slum clearance over public housing, they were engaging in institutional conversion. The likelihood of conversion increases to the extent that discretion in the interpretation and enforcement of rules is high (Mahoney and Thelen 2010b). Finally, drift occurs when policy makers deliberately fail to adjust rules to bring them into sync with changing social conditions. The refusal of lawmakers to engage in redistricting despite clear evidence of population change is an example of drift. Drift is often largely invisible, an act of “nondecisionmaking” (Bachrach and Baratz 1970) that may mask significant changes in the effects of policies and institutions. Through mechanisms such as these, urban governing arrangements may evolve in ways that fall short of the breakdown and replacement of existing policies, institutions, or power structures, but result nevertheless in cumulative changes over time that have transformative impacts. All this does not imply that urban political change is never punctuated and that path dependence perspectives are unsuitable for examining urban political processes. It does suggest, however, that scholars be selective in applying the path dependence concept and display some sensitivity to other ways that urban governing arrangements evolve. As Mahoney (2010) argues, the more important question may not be whether change is normally punctuated or incremental, but rather under what circumstances change is most likely to take one form or the other. This is a subject that has received little theoretical or empirical attention (see Hall 2010), and studies of urban political development could prove useful in developing and testing hypotheses about when path dependence approaches are particularly promising and when incremental approaches seem more appropriate.

68  PART I    Governance and Political Economy […] Although punctuated and incremental approaches differ markedly in the way they conceptualize change, both perspectives share a deep-seated skepticism of functionalist and power-distributional perspectives that view institutional forms as deriving largely from current power configurations and functional demands. Despite their sensitivity to institutional evolution, even incremental approaches are attentive to positive feedback processes and lock-in effects that link current outcomes, in part, to critical juncture periods in the distant past. In that sense, they do not represent a wholesale rejection of path dependence arguments.11 The point, as Thelen (2004, 296, emphasis original) argues, is “to specify which aspects of the system are getting stably reproduced over time and which are subject to renegotiation and why.” Such efforts require analysis that is genuinely historical, attuned to processes and sequences of events that take place across extended periods of time.

A Note on Methods Studies that examine social processes over time require detailed case analysis, typically done through careful process tracing. Although there are several variants of this approach (see Bates et al. 1998; Hall 2003; Büthe 2002), most applications of process tracing conform to George and Bennett’s (2005, 206) definition as a method that “attempts to identify the intervening causal process—the causal chain and causal mechanism—between an independent variable (or variables) and the outcome of the dependent variable.” Such studies are theoretically guided narratives. They identify mechanisms— such as policy feedback or institutional conversion—that help explain how outcomes of interest were produced and provide accounts that show in detail how mechanisms operate in specific situations. In this sense, process tracing differs from untheorized historical narratives, where explanations of historical outcomes are typically limited to the case at hand. Studies using process tracing seek explanations that have some portability. With their emphasis on theory and hypothesis testing, such approaches easily withstand conventional critiques of case studies as “merely telling stories” (Thelen 1999, 372). In focusing on causal chains and causal mechanisms, process tracing is strongest in the area where large-N, quantitative studies tend to be the weakest. As George and Bennett (2005) argue, large-N studies are particularly effective in determining causal effects. That is, they can show convincingly how measures of one or more independent variables correlate with particular outcomes across large numbers of cases. Although good quantitative studies will specify the processes through which explanatory variables are hypothesized to produce outcomes, observations about process often remain outside the research design. Because case studies using process tracing make such observations directly, such studies may play an important role in theory testing and in identifying spurious correlations (Hall 2003; Mahoney 2003,

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2007). For example, process tracing might be used to determine whether the existence of a particular institution, such as an urban regime, is better explained through a functionalist or a path dependence approach. If specific historical processes can be identified that produced the institution in question and caused it to assume and maintain a particular form over time, then a path dependence approach may be more convincing than a functionalist one even if the institution is shown to serve a useful function for powerful actors in the present. In such arguments, careful process tracing is necessary to establish each link in the causal chain that produced the final outcome, beginning with the critical juncture that set the process in motion. Arguments are weakened to the extent that gaps or ambiguities in the narrative allow for alternative explanations.

Conclusion Like other social scientists, urban scholars have made significant advances through the application of increasingly sophisticated methodological tools and procedures for conducting variable-centered quantitative analysis. Case study research, another mainstay of the field, continues to produce both useful empirical findings and valuable theoretical insights about (mainly) contemporary social processes. While such approaches continue to dominate the urban studies literature, far less scholarly attention is being paid to what Pierson (2004, 13) calls “big, slow-moving aspects of the social world.” The types of long-term processes on which this essay concentrates remain largely hidden when the focus of investigation is limited to the present or the recent past, as is the case with most contemporary studies of urban politics and urban political processes. As Pierson (2004, 79) argues in his critique of contemporary social science more generally, “Both in what we seek to explain and in our search for explanations, we focus on the immediate—we look for causes and outcomes that are both temporally contiguous and rapidly unfolding. In the process, we miss a lot. There are important things that we do not see at all, and what we do see we often misunderstand.” Social scientists undertaking historical analysis do so for different reasons, and this essay has emphasized one in particular. In arguments about path dependence, policy feedback, timing and sequence, and punctuated versus incremental change, history matters not so much because events in the past are interesting in and of themselves, or because they provide lessons or serve as testing grounds for contemporary theories. Rather, history matters because certain outcomes we seek to understand can be explained only by adopting an extended temporal frame of reference. As Pierson (2000a, 264) puts it, “It is not the past per se but the unfolding of processes over time that is theoretically central.” In short, history matters because time and temporality matter. If Pierson and his contemporaries are indeed correct about the importance of time and temporality in social scientific investigation, then the dearth of

70  PART I    Governance and Political Economy such approaches in the urban studies literature represents a major theoretical and empirical gap. While there are multiple advantages for urban scholars in drawing on the literature on temporal processes, what is particularly exciting is the prospect of studies building on one another to produce a collaborative research program in urban political development. As Thomas Kuhn (1970) famously argued, knowledge can advance rapidly when a community of scholars focuses attention around a particular theoretical question or set of questions. Scholarly paradigms that attract widespread attention are tested, articulated, and elaborated through the cumulative efforts of many individual practitioners, each of whom brings different empirical evidence to bear on the puzzles that the paradigm presents. Such is the case with studies of path dependence and other temporal processes, where scholars whose empirical interests and preoccupations vary widely have helped build and elaborate a vibrant research tradition, each new study building on what came before. The urban politics field seems ripe for a similar theoretical rallying point. Evidence points increasingly to the notion of urban regimes as a historically specific phenomenon that may be running its course (see Judd and Laslo 2010; Stone and Whelan 2009). With interest in regime and growth machine studies waning and no obvious successors around which to coalesce, the field of urban politics has become increasingly fragmented. A research program on urban temporal processes is not likely to dominate the urban politics literature in the way that regime analysis once did, but it could attract a significant number of historically minded urban scholars motivated both by their own empirical interests as well as a desire to contribute to a larger theoretical undertaking. An additional benefit of a research program on temporal processes is that it provides an opportunity for urban scholars, particularly urban political scientists and sociologists, to forge links with other areas of their respective disciplines. It was not so terribly long ago that debates about power and democracy led by urban scholars occupied center stage in political science and sociology (see Hunter 1953; Dahl 1961b; Banfield 1961; Polsby 1980; Bachrach and Baratz 1970; Lukes 1974; Gaventa 1980). In recent decades, however, as the theoretical orientations and questions posed by urbanists diverged increasingly from mainstream scholarship, urban scholars have found their work relegated to the margins, a development that has led to considerable angst and soul searching (Peterson 1981; Trounstine 2009; Judd 2005; Sharp 2007; Imbroscio 2010). Some have even characterized the urban politics subfield as a “black hole” from which few ideas escape and that incorporates few insights and innovations from outside the subfield (Sapotichne, Jones, and Wolfe 2007). A research program on urban temporal processes could (and should) engage scholarship from such fields as historical institutionalism, American political development, comparative politics, comparative sociology, and rational

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choice, where contributions from urban scholars are presently minimal. Urbanists participating in such an endeavor may find their work relevant to a considerably wider audience than is presently the case for most studies of urban politics. Opportunities for developing a collaborative research agenda and reducing the provincialism of urban scholarship are nontrivial benefits of a historically and temporally oriented urban research program. In the end, however, we should turn to history chiefly for the reason that scholars such as Robert Dahl and Clarence Stone have, that is, because certain outcomes we wish to explain require a longer-term frame of reference than most urban scholars presently employ. Historical research need not be the dominant approach in the literature on urban governance, and that is not the argument here. However, it should be well represented in urban studies journals and books alongside the approaches that currently dominate the literature. Until that happens we will continue, as Pierson succinctly puts it, to “miss a lot.” Efforts to position time and history more centrally in the urban politics literature are needed if we are to develop convincing explanations for many social and political outcomes we seek to better comprehend.

Acknowledgements My thanks to Jonathan Davies, three anonymous reviewers, and the editors of Urban Affairs Review for their thoughtful critiques of earlier versions of this article. These ideas grew in part out of a colloquy on time and temporality in urban political analysis at the 2011 annual meeting of the Urban Affairs Association, and I thank the participants—Richard Dilworth, Steve Erie, Douglas Rae, and especially Clarence Stone—for their contributions.

Notes   1

For several noteworthy exceptions see Trounstine (2008), Rae (2003), Erie (2004, 2006), and Dilworth (2005, 2009).   2 Within the Marxist tradition, only the derivationist school is avowedly functionalist. My thanks to Jonathan Davies for pointing this out to me.  3 Scholars have criticized loose definitions of path dependence because such applications are said to rob the concept of much of its analytical power and clarity (see Mahoney 2000, 2001; Pierson 2004).   4 For example, the Fair Housing Act was designed not to achieve integration, but to give Blacks with sufficient resources a wider set of housing choices. While many fair housing advocacy groups support the goal of integration, extensions of the Fair Housing Act since 1968 have not provided resources or incentives for the pursuit of such activities (Sidney 2003).   5 Arguments about path dependence are well represented in the literature on urban geography and industrial location (see Martin and Sunley 2006; Bishop and Gripaios

72  PART I    Governance and Political Economy 2007; Wolfe and Gertler 2004; Marshall 2007; Batty 2001; Gordon and McCann 2000; Simmie 2004). The origins and development of certain high-performance regional industrial districts such as Silicon Valley, the Emilia-Romagna province of northern Italy, and Germany’s Baden-Württemberg region are sometimes described as having path-dependent qualities. In many accounts, the emergence of distinctive production regimes in such areas—emphasizing collaborative relations among small firms and continuous innovation over scale economies—is portrayed as the result of contingent events or historical “accidents” that triggered self-reinforcing processes (Piore and Sabel 1984; Sabel and Zeitlin 1997; Herrigel 1996; Scott 1988; Hirst and Zeitlin 1989; Pyke and Sengenberger 1992).   6 The Pallas and Jennings (2010) study cited earlier is an exception to this pattern.   7 See Pierson (2004, 56–58) for additional discussion of the difficulties of theorizing temporal orderings and intersections.   8 Pierson also considers sequencing arguments in rational choice theory as a possible source of propositions and hypotheses about temporal orderings and intersections. As he argues, however, the emphasis of rational choice theory on the “moves” of actors places significant limits on the range of social processes that rational choice perspectives can usefully analyze (Pierson 2004, 62).   9 Due in large part to this effort, Milwaukee gained 2,500 manufacturing jobs from 1950 to 1960, a time when manufacturing jobs were beginning to decline in most older industrial cities. Chicago, for example, lost 90,000 manufacturing jobs during the same period (Rast 2009). 10 The relative frequency of punctuated versus incremental change is a point of contention in the literature on institutional development. Arguing for the other side, Pierson (2000b, 78) contends that there are reasons to believe path dependence and self-reinforcing processes are “widespread in political life.” 11 Thelen has characterized her work on incremental change as a “friendly amendment” to arguments about path dependence and self-reinforcing processes (see Thelen 2000, 102).

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CHAPTER 1   The Pillars of American Urban Scholarship in a Global Age   75 Isaac L. W. 1997. “Transforming Localities.” Historical Methods 30:4–14. Jones B. D., Baumgartner F. R. 2005. The Politics of Attention: How Government Prioritizes Problems. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press. Jones B. D., Sulkin T., Larsen H. A. 2003. “Policy Punctuations in American Political Institutions.” American Political Science Review 97:151–69. Judd D. R. 2005. “Everything Is Always Going to Hell: Urban Scholars as End-Times Prophets.” Urban Affairs Review 41:119–31. Judd D. R., Laslo D. 2010. “The Regime Moment: The Brief But Storied Career of Urban Regimes in American Cities.” Paper presented at the 2010 annual meeting of the Urban Affairs Association, Honolulu, HI, March. Kantor P., David S. M. 1988. The Dependent City: The Changing Political Economy of Urban America. Glenview, IL: Scott, Foresman. Katznelson I. 1981. City Trenches: Urban Politics and the Patterning of Class in the United States. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press. Katznelson I. 1992. “The State to the Rescue? Political Science and History Reconnect.” Social Research 59:719–38. Kennedy M. D. 1984. “The Fiscal Crisis of the City.” In Cities in Transformation: Class, Capital, and the State, edited by Smith M. P., 91–110. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Kuhn T. S. 1970. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press. Levi M. 1997. “A Model, a Method, and a Map: Rational Choice in Comparative and Historical Analysis.” In Comparative Politics: Rationality, Culture, and Structure, edited by Lichbach M. I., Zuckerman A. S., 19–41. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press. Logan J. R., Molotch H. L. 1987. Urban Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place. Berkeley Univ. of California Press. Lukes S. 1974. Power: A Radical View. London: Macmillan. Mahoney J. 2000. “Path Dependence in Historical Sociology.” Theory and Society 29:507–48. Mahoney J. 2001. The Legacies of Liberalism: Path Dependence and Political Regimes in Central America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press. Mahoney J. 2003. “Strategies of Causal Assessment in Comparative Historical Analysis.” In Comparative Historical Analysis in the Social Sciences, edited by Mahoney J., Rueschemeyer D., 337–72. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press. Mahoney J. 2006. “Analyzing Path Dependence: Lessons from the Social Sciences.” In Understanding Change: Models, Methodologies, and Metaphors, edited by Wimmer A., Kossler R., 129–39. New York: Palgrave. Mahoney J. 2007. “Qualitative Methodology and Comparative Politics.” Comparative Political Studies 40:122–44. Mahoney J. 2010. “Conceptualizing and Explaining Punctuated Versus Incremental Change.” Paper presented at the 2010 annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Washington, DC, September. Mahoney J., Thelen K., eds. 2010a. Explaining Institutional Change: Ambiguity, Agency, and Power. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press. Mahoney J., Thelen K. 2010b. “A Theory of Gradual Institutional Change.” In Explaining Institutional Change: Ambiguity, Agency, and Power, edited by Mahoney J., Thelen K., 1–37. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press. March J. G., Olsen J. P. 1984. “The New Institutionalism: Organizational Factors in Political Life.” American Political Science Review 78:734–49.

76  PART I    Governance and Political Economy Marshall J. D. 2007. “Urban Land Area and Population Growth: A New Scaling Relationship for Metropolitan Expansion.” Urban Studies 44:1889–1904. Martin R., Sunley P. 2006. “Path Dependence and Regional Economic Evolution.” Journal of Economic Geography 6:395–437. McDonald T. J., ed. 1996. The Historic Turn in the Human Sciences. Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press. Mettler S. 2002. “Bringing the State Back in to Civic Engagement: Policy Feedback Effects of the G.I. Bill for World War II Veterans.” American Political Science Review 96:351–65. Mettler S. 2005. Soldiers to Citizens: The G.I. Bill and the Making of the Greatest Generation. New York: Oxford Univ. Press. Mettler S., Soss J. 2004. “The Consequences of Public Policy for Democratic Citizenship Bridging Policy Studies and Mass Politics.” Perspectives on Politics 2:55–73. Mettler S., Stonecash J. M. 2008. “Government Program Usage and Political Voice.” Social Science Quarterly 89:273–93. Mollenkopf J. H. 1983. The Contested City. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press. Molotch H. L. 1976. “The City as a Growth Machine: Toward a Political Economy of Place.” American Journal of Sociology 82:309–32. North D. C. 1990. Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press. O’Connor J. 1973. The Fiscal Crisis of the State. New York: St. Martin’s. Orren K., Skowronek S. 2004. The Search for American Political Development. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press. Palier B. 2005. “Ambiguous Agreement, Cumulative Change: French Social Policy in the 1990s.” In Beyond Continuity: Institutional Change in Advanced Political Economies, edited by Streek W., Thelen K., 127–44. Oxford, UK: Oxford Univ. Press. Pallas A. M., Jennings J. L. 2010. “A Multiplex Theory of Urban Service Distribution: The Case of School Expenditures.” Urban Affairs Review 45:608–43. Peterson P. E. 1981. City Limits. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press. Pflieger G., Kaufmann V., Pattaroni L., Jemelin C. 2009. “How Does Urban Public Transport Change Cities? Correlations Between Past and Present Transport and Urban Planning Policies.” Urban Studies 46:1421–37. Pierson P. 1993. “When Effect Becomes Cause: Policy Feedback and Political Change.” World Politics 45:595–628. Pierson P. 1994. Dismantling the Welfare State? Reagan, Thatcher, and the Politics of Retrenchment. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press. Pierson P. 2000a. “Increasing Returns, Path Dependence, and the Study of Politics.” American Political Science Review 94:251–67. Pierson P. 2000b. “Not Just What, But When: Timing and Sequence in Political Processes.” Studies in American Political Development 14:72–92. Pierson P. 2004. Politics in Time: History, Institutions, and Social Analysis. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press. Pierson P. 2006. “Public Policies as Institutions.” In Rethinking Political Institutions: The Art of the State, edited by Shapiro I., Skowronek S., Galvin D., 114–31. New York: New York Univ. Press. Piore M. J., Sabel C. F. 1984. The Second Industrial Divide: Possibilities for Prosperity. New York: Basic Books.

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CHAPTER 2 The Politics of Urban Economic Development in a New Era Editors’ Introduction For many decades scholars of urban politics focused attention on the critical role that coalitions play in leading urban development initiatives. As Stone makes clear in the selection in the preceding chapter, these coalitions are often reliant on both public- and private-sector actors. While coalitions have been a stable feature of urban governance, postindustrial shifts have affected the composition of coalitions. In some instances, such shifts are reflected in the nature of the nongovernmental actors involved in urban governance and economic development discussions. This primarily relates to the increasingly global character of private companies in U.S. cities. Publicprivate coalitions and regimes in the mid-20th century (e.g., Stone’s Atlanta case) were more likely to feature business leaders from locally owned, and locally headquartered, companies. The roots of capital have become global, and while such roots still impact the local economy in positive ways, for example, by bringing in employees and city residents, they do not run as deep in terms of a local commitment to governance. While it still may be common for corporate entities to sponsor local endeavors, this is qualitatively different from decades-long and generations-deep commitment to a city or region. The “hometown banker,” it turns out, was a much better urban citizen than the global manager. Sands, Filon, and Reese analyze the ways in which changing corporate and business profiles in cities affect the nature and character of economic development in large cities with a specific focus on big tech companies.

DOI: 10.4324/9781315163635-379

80  PART I    Governance and Political Economy Though the companies may be newer and from different industries, Sands, Filon, and Reese highlight the fact that tax incentive packages remain a key tool for cities attempting to draw new firms to cities. Amazon’s search for a second headquarters (one of the cases studied here), which essentially became one of the more intense (and public) bidding wars for a business relocation in recent history, is a case in point. However, Sands, Filon, and Reese argue that with a new era in business hierarchy where tech firms and global conglomerates are the key targets for cities, the nature of the incentive packages required to guarantee a commitment mean that only the most financially sound cities have a real chance at attracting commitments. The advantages for attracting new development, in the big tech era, in other words, will reside with the cities already doing well financially. As readers will discover, however, public pressure on decision-makers can still have an impact on private companies’ location decisions. Both trends mimic a pattern described by Kantor and Savitch, although perhaps on a smaller scale, in which cities are willing to go beyond simple marketing to secure private investment—public entities are practically expected to reduce the costs of a private company locating in their jurisdiction by producing tax abatements, new infrastructure, or other developments. This has led scholars and policy experts to question whether costs relating to business recruitment are worth it. While we see evidence of such arguments in Kantor and Savitch’s selection, they push back on the idea that cities are always in a vulnerable position when it comes to business recruitment. In a piece that is a pillar of the literature on governance, and specifically city-business relations, Kantor and Savitch suggest that a city’s level of vulnerability comes down to “bargaining” power, and this will vary depending on the character of a city. If a city has a strong market condition, it will not be as desperate to bring in new development and can thus offer fewer incentives to a business with the knowledge that a business may wish to locate in the city anyhow in order to tap into the strong market conditions already in place. Much depends, too, on the context of intergovernmental relations. A city that receives high levels of financial support from parent governments is in a better bargaining position because it stands to lose less if a business selects a different locale than a city that is more dependent on locally generated revenue such as property taxes. In Kantor and Savitch’s selection, this dynamic is highlighted by comparing Amsterdam to Detroit. Elsewhere, of course, their work has highlighted the relative bargaining positions of cities across North America and Europe. Kantor and Savitch highlight the tensions between public and private power when it comes to urban economic development. These tensions can

CHAPTER 2   The Politics of Urban Economic Development in a New Era   81

be most evident as corporations make decisions regarding where to locate, and where to stay in the long term. But how do corporate and nonprofit interests affect the nature of governance in cities once they are in place? Smith’s focus on the “intergovernmental triad” in Chicago demonstrates that urban governance decisions and coalition structures depend a great deal on “where the money is” intergovernmentally speaking. While the coalitions that initially formed during Stone’s “regime” era were focused on securing federal Urban Renewal funds, federal funding of urban development was depleted in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and state governments became a common coalitional partner for large cities looking to finance expensive infrastructure projects for their “new” downtowns. The principal institutional vehicle for these state-city partnerships was the special-purpose development authority, which had the autonomy and financial independence to expedite and fund development projects that were out of the reach for cash-strapped cities of the era. The Chicago case demonstrates that such state-city arrangements drew in many of the same interests and partners that Stone had considered members of regimes in earlier eras. The difference, from Smith’s perspective, is that such arrangements become formalized when special-purpose governments are created and private-sector representatives are appointed to governing boards of public bodies. The cases presented from Chicago, and examples from other cities, suggest that the institutions used to finance and govern large development projects are necessitating a change in the way scholars approach theory relating to public-private coalitions—and specifically that the urban regime concept is not a widely applicable as it was in earlier eras (an argument explored by Stone). Students considering research topics related to urban coalitions face no shortage of remaining research questions. Students might consider the institutional vehicles through which urban coalitions are exercising power in contemporary cities. Do local businesses continue to play a role, or have global corporations replaced them in local governing coalitions? Have new institutional forms emerged in a city that students are studying? Which governmental actors are most involved in largescale urban development—mayors, city councilors, state governors, CEOs, nonprofit board chairs? Are the principal corporate players coming from expected sectors such as real estate? What role have corporate leaders from emerging sectors such as tech played in local governance? If Stone’s argument that urban governance takes cooperation from the public and private sector holds, student research in urban settings will uncover the new forms this collaboration is taking and if it is still a center for power as it has been in previous eras.

82  PART I    Governance and Political Economy

5 Techs and the Cities: A New Economic Development Paradigm? Gary Sands, Pierre Filion and Laura A. Reese*

Introduction Over the past few decades, local economic development efforts, particularly in North America, have been affected by deindustrialization and the growth of information technology. The ‘new economy’ of the 21st century places greater emphasis on services and investments in human capital (Alcaly, 2003; Glaeser  & Saiz, 2004). Manufacturing employment in North America has declined as a result of both automation and the transfer of routine production activity to lower wage locations (Bluestone, 2003). The Computer Revolution has not only led to expansion of new highly skilled jobs, but it has also exacerbated the uneven growth of urban areas (Berger & Frey, 2015). The primary objective of this article is to assess how this ongoing economic restructuring has affected economic development practices in North America. We do this through an examination of two significant development proposals in which giant technology companies sought incentives and concessions from prosperous global cities. While development proposals at this scale are likely to be uncommon, we believe that these examples are indicative of how Big Tech may redefine the local economic development process. For the past 75 years, governments have used incentives to redirect private investment to promote local economic development. Often, these efforts are justified as corrections for perceived ‘market failures’ (Seidman, 2005). Areas may be targeted because they are low income, with high unemployment and declining populations and property values. Incentives are perceived to be necessary to make these locations more competitive; private investments would not occur ‘but for’ the availability of incentives (Peters & Fisher, 2004; Sands & Reese, 2012). Critics of economic development incentives argue that they are a form of ‘corporate welfare,’ in effect paying firms to do what they would likely have done absent the incentives (LeRoy, 2005). Peters and Fisher (2004) suggest that 90% of economic development spending is wasted. When large scale * Gary Sands, Pierre Filion, Laura A. Reese,‘Techs and the Cities: A New Economic Development Paradigm?’, Urban Planning, 5.3, 2020, pp. 392–402, https://doi.org/10.17645/up.v5i3.2986   ©Gary Sands, Pierre Filion, Laura A. Reese. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license (http://creativecommons. org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits any use, distribution, and reproduction of the work without further permission provided the original author(s) and source are credited.

CHAPTER 2   The Politics of Urban Economic Development in a New Era   83

investments are at stake, however, as in the location of a large manufacturing plant or corporate headquarters, the firms frequently have the upper hand in negotiations (LeRoy, 2018). Although they are often characterized as win-win situations, the public sector is typically responsible for substantial upfront costs, while the corporate investors receive benefits long before the government or its citizens do. Traditional economic development strategies have sought to attract manufacturing jobs and the attendant investment in plant and equipment. In recent decades, globalization and deindustrialization have contributed to the decline of manufacturing, making competition for new manufacturing facilities more intense. The growth of information technology and the ‘knowledge economy’ has introduced a new focus for economic development activity (Berger & Frey, 2015). Tech firms are desirable targets for economic developers because they pay high wages, are less restricted in their location choices by need for accessibility to raw materials, supply chains and customers, benefit from clustering of firms and contribute to a positive image for the host community. The emergence of high-tech firms as a target of economic development efforts could fundamentally change the nature of local economic development. In this article, we consider several issues related to these potential changes: Does the focus on high tech firms represent a new local economic development paradigm, one that introduces new policy instruments, to attract high end jobs? Will this new focus also shift the balance of power between the public and private sectors, as well as among the communities seeking to attract new economy firms, those that are high tech and information intensive? How does this ‘reaching for the top’ in terms of firms and job categories and the economic status of residents differ from the previous economic development attempts to attract middle-class manufacturing jobs? We offer two examples of urban economic development approaches that involve firms at the summit of the corporate hierarchy and that target, for the most part, high-income residents. One is the settlement of the headquarters of one of the largest US corporations and the other the planning and development by another giant firm of a central neighborhood according to a technologically driven model. While not claiming to cover all possible variants, these examples nonetheless illustrate how manifestations of this type of ‘summit’ development can differ from one another. These examples share defining features of this top-reaching form of urban economic development. First, they target highly valuable, centrally located land in global cities at the summit of their national urban system. Second, the main proponents are Tech Giants. The developments target top corporations and, to a large extent, high-income residents. Although the attention in the article is on large projects deployed in global cities, analogous features of these projects are found in smaller-scale economic development initiatives occurring in variously sized urban areas. The focus is thus on iconic examples of an economic development transition that is widespread.

84  PART I    Governance and Political Economy The next section of the article provides a brief overview of trends in local economic development policies. This is followed by a description of the cases, including a comparison of their key features. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications of these new economic development models for public policy.

Economic Development Policy Trends Local economic development strategies have evolved through several phases during the last half of the 20th century (Eisinger, 1988; Jansa & Gray, 2017; Tassonyi, 2005). From the mid-1980s, the emphasis was on the attraction or retention of businesses by providing subsidized infrastructure or targeted incentives such as tax abatements (Hill, Wolman, Kowalczky, & St. Clair, 2012; Saiz & Clarke, 2013). The second period introduced a new focus on financial, technological and knowledge infrastructure (Tassonyi, 2005). In the early 2000s, it appeared that the emphasis had begun to shift to strategies based on human capital development and quality of life enhancement including arts and culture-driven strategies (Florida, 2002; Grodach, 2011; Stern & Seifert, 2010). These periods have been cumulative rather than evolutionary, however; once in place, early tools and strategies continue to be used. It appears difficult to ‘wind down’ the use of subsidies once they have been introduced (Jansa & Gray, 2017). The Great Recession (2008–2009) provided a flash-point for revisiting local development policy to explore potential impacts on how local governments approach development and the extent of resources allocated to that effort. The stresses of the Great Recession appear to have reinforced the path dependency of local development policy, pushing municipalities toward ever more intensive use of the same old set of incentives. Businesses come to expect particular incentives once they are offered by a number of cities or states, and the tool becomes locked in place as a standard part of development packages (Reese, 2006; Sands & Reese, 2012). As manufacturing employment has decreased, local officials have become ever more focused on attracting higher order, often technology intensive employers. Research on cities that have managed to come back from economic distress has indicated that, while specific strategies have varied, investment in a technology-based economy and an ‘environmentally friendly lifestyle’ (read: a lifestyle for the upper and creative classes) has been common (Kodrzycki & Muñoz, 2015). For a particular group of cities, those world class ones in the toptier, competition increases as they alone can afford the types of ‘deals’ that rent-seeking firms’ desire in their location processes (Markusen & Nesse, 2007). Although focused at the state level, some of the largest incentive deals in the US from 2006 to 2013 have gone to information technology firms and retailers that have substantial sales in e-tail such as Amazon and were provided by just “a few states subsidizing a few large firms” (Jansa & Gray, 2017, p. 56).

CHAPTER 2   The Politics of Urban Economic Development in a New Era   85

Examinations of local development policy trends post-Great Recession have come to similar conclusions: “A dramatic rise in the use of business incentives” (Warner & Zheng, 2013, p. 90) post-recession has led local officials to offer more and larger traditional incentives to attract new targets of employment, specifically the technology sector (Lowe, 2012). Analysis of the 2004 and 2009 International City/County Management Association surveys indicated that increasing numbers of local government respondents said that the technology sector was the primary focus of their economic development activities (Warner & Zheng, 2013). Direct government financial support of research and development appears particularly important in attracting multinational firms (Rodríguez-Pose & Wilkie, 2016) and the technology sector is increasingly the focus of local economic development (Warner  & Zheng, 2013). Similar conclusions have been drawn about economic development policy at the state level where overall spending on subsidies to influence industry location decisions has increased as has the number of very large subsidy packages, although again, states vary in the size of their incentives packages if not their content (Jansa & Gray, 2017). In other words, the old dogs are being asked to perform the same tricks but for a different audience. But only a small group of cities can afford to have the largest dogs. This is exacerbated by the fact that, along with the size of the incentive packages, the most sought-after businesses are increasingly those that provide high paying jobs for skilled workers. Research suggests that the largest firms and those most active in lobbying governments for incentives are likely to benefit the most from the increasing size of incentive packages (Jansa & Gray, 2017) although there is a chicken and egg quandary here: Are incentive packages larger because of the changing nature of the firms that cities are trying to attract or do larger firms have the resources to drive the incentive packages upwards? From an equity standpoint, multinational firms appear to favor cities with greater connectivity in terms of producer services, airport passenger traffic and international co-inventor activity when locating their headquarters (Belderbos, Du, & Goerzen, 2017), while high tech jobs are likely to locate in cities with a more advanced skills base (Berger & Frey, 2015). These are also the communities most likely to be able to afford expensive incentive packages, leading to a rich get richer dynamic. There are a variety of reasons—both political and economic—why public subsidization of private firms has increased over time in both numbers of incentives and the magnitudes of the deals: the recession, the path dependent nature of economic development policy, competition between cities and states, the loss of large manufacturing entities forcing communities to compete for a smaller pool of higher tech jobs, capture of the policy-making process by business via both lobbying and campaign donations, and the tendency for local officials to view subsidizing business as being in the ‘public interest’ (Bartik, 2019; Jansa & Gray, 2017; Kwak, 2014; Posner, 2014;

86  PART I    Governance and Political Economy Sands & Reese, 2012). At the same time, and despite considerable research attesting to their effectiveness, there has been a shift away from economic development incentives that invest in the local community more broadly defined: education, job training, services, and small business start-up support (Filion, Reese, & Sands, 2019; Hill et al., 2012; Kodrzycki & Muñoz, 2015; Reese & Ye, 2011). Ten years after the end of the Great Recession and well into the global rise of high technology and Internet-dependent firms, has local economic development fundamentally changed?

Case Study Methodology This article considers two examples of large economic development projects that made use of a variety of incentives to promote investment. The two case studies are based on a literature review and secondary analysis of publicly available documents, including government reports, corporate proposals, third party analyses and media reports. Details of the negotiations are not publicly available. As a result, we can be certain of outcomes but often not of the negotiations that led up to them. In 2017, Amazon held an open competition to decide a location for its second headquarters (HQ2). The company announced its selection of Long Island City as one of two locations that would share the total investment and jobs, but then abandoned this location despite being offered a $3 billion incentive package. Sidewalk Labs (the city-building division of Alphabet, the parent company of Google) responded to a request for proposals to create an innovation neighborhood in Toronto, but after two and a half years of plan making and negotiations, dropped the project invoking economic uncertainty caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. These high-profile cases were selected based on several criteria. First, we believe they reflect a turn in economic development tendencies, focusing on high-status jobs and residents, firms at the top of the corporate hierarchy and the most appealing cities and sectors therein. Second, they represent cases that illustrate bargaining between the public and private sectors. Finally, the local government agencies in New York and Toronto are expected to be in a relatively strong bargaining position vis a vis the high-tech firms at hand.

Case Analysis: Amazon’s HQ2 Amazon exhibits many of the salient characteristics of the modern technology driven firm. In a relatively short period, it has risen from an on-line book retailer to become a diversified e-commerce conglomerate that is one of the most valuable companies in the world. The firm’s profitability has been enhanced by some $2.4 billion in subsidies that it has received from state and local governments over the years (Weise, Fernandez, & Eligon,

CHAPTER 2   The Politics of Urban Economic Development in a New Era   87

2019). In initiating what has been described as a “Hunger Games-style civic competition” (Matsakis, 2018), Amazon’s search for a location for a HQ2 epitomizes the superior bargaining power of Big Tech, as well as what can go wrong with economic development initiatives in the current postmanufacturing era. The announcement by Amazon of an open competition to select the location for its HQ2 represents one of the single largest economic development opportunities in history. Amazon offered the winning city a $5 billion investment and the creation of up to 50,000 well-paid new jobs (Matsakis, 2018). Implicit in the announcement was the expectation that Amazon would be able to obtain larger incentives through inter-municipal competition. In addition, the proposal responses (more than 200 in total) provided Amazon with valuable intelligence on the communities that were not selected. Amazon’s request for proposals identified the criteria that would be important in their decision. The company sought a site in an urban area with a minimum population of one million that offered readily available sites, affordable housing, good public transportation, and a large pool of skilled workers. Amazon essentially asked communities what such a massive investment and job creation opportunity was worth to them, what sort of tribute they were willing to offer to secure the favor of the world’s richest individual. There are a number of reasons why local communities would consider Amazon to be worthy of receiving incentives. As initially proposed, the Amazon HQ2 would provide a substantial number of jobs. The jobs would be new to the selected community and to the local labor market in general; that is, they would not be transfers from a nearby existing location. The new jobs would be highly desirable because they would be well paid, an average salary of $150,000. These jobs are particularly attractive because they are ‘new economy’ jobs—digital, high-tech, information intensive—with good future prospects. Nor will they produce the negative externalities (such as air and water pollution) that a similar number of manufacturing jobs might. The Amazon HQ2 is perceived as being particularly footloose since it is not dependent on supply chains and distribution networks. In November 2018, Amazon announced that it would split its HQ2 between New York City and Northern Virginia (Berube, 2018). Each location would see half of the total promised investment and half of the jobs. The New York site selected was Long Island City in Queens. The site is served by eight subway lines and the Long Island Railroad. Existing office space totals 2.5 million square feet, with 500,000 square feet available for phase one in the Court Square Building. In addition, Long Island City offered the potential for 7.6 million square feet of new construction, most on land controlled by the city and state (State of New York, 2017). Amazon’s facilities would

88  PART I    Governance and Political Economy TABLE 1 Socio-economic characteristics of the Long Island City area 2017 according to the American Community Survey (2017) New York City

Long Island City Zip Code 11101

Population 2017

8,426,746

25,880

Average household size

2.7

2.3

Adults with BA

36.7%

47%

Median household income

$60,819

$60,560

Poverty rate

20.6%

21.9%

Unemployment rate

4.2%

6.7%

Median home value

$836,226

$951,480

be integrated into the existing urban fabric, rather than being isolated on a separate campus; its space needs could be accommodated within a fiveminute walk. The Long Island City neighborhood, while somewhat neglected, could hardly be classified as distressed. Indeed, the demographic profile of the ZIP code area that includes the site closely matches that of New York City as a whole (Table 1). Census Bureau data indicate that the area’s recent job growth rate was double the City-wide average. The incentive package that the City and State of New York offered to Amazon was valued at $3 billion (Campbell, 2018). In return for creating 25,000 to 40,000 high paying jobs and occupying at least four million square feet of office space, Amazon’s income taxes would be reduced by $2.1 billion and its property taxes by $386 million. An additional amount (up to $505 million) would be in the form of cash grants tied to job creation. On February 14, 2019, Amazon announced that it was canceling plans for its HQ2 investment in New York City (McCartney & O’Connell, 2019). Amazon indicated that it was unwilling to proceed with the project in the face of grass roots and political opposition. Although there was a real risk that the project could be denied a necessary approval by the Public Authorities Control Board (Ritholz, 2019), for the most part, the proposal enjoyed the support of the City and State (de Blasio, 2019; Goodman, 2019). A mutually acceptable agreement had been reached between Amazon and New York City and State, the details of which have not however been made public. When confronted with community and some political opposition, the firm simply decided to walk away.

CHAPTER 2   The Politics of Urban Economic Development in a New Era   89

Case Study: Sidewalk Toronto’s Quayside Toronto, Ontario is the fastest growing major urban region in North America. For Toronto, the issue is not how to attract economic development but rather how the seemingly inevitable growth can be managed most successfully. Thus, the effort by Waterfront Toronto to find a partner for the redevelopment of the Eastern Waterfront area should provide an example of an economic development scenario in which the public sector retains the upper hand. The restructuring of Toronto’s economy in the later decades of the 20th century has created opportunities for the redevelopment of the city’s manufacturing and port facilities to accommodate the rapid growth of financial, technology and professional services employment, as well as recreation and tourism. Waterfront Toronto, a public body created by the Municipal, Provincial and Federal governments, was charged with overseeing the transformation of Toronto’s lakeshore through infrastructure (including investments in flood control, wastewater management and transportation projects), open space development and participation in the creation of new employment and residential centers. Since its creation in 1999, Waterfront Toronto has been responsible for 2.5 million square feet of construction, 2,600 housing units and 90 acres of parks and public open space (Waterfront Toronto, 2017). The Quayside site is located south of Lake Shore Boulevard East, about two kilometers east of Union Station (at the center of Downtown Toronto). To the south and east of the Quayside parcel, the area consists primarily of vacant industrial and commercial properties, most of which are in public ownership. North of the site, but separated from it by the elevated Gardiner Expressway, is a residential area of mid-rise residential units. The demographic profile of the residential areas is similar to the city-wide statistics (Table 2). TABLE 2 Socio-economic characteristics of the Quayside area  2016 according to Statistics Canada (2016) City of Toronto

Quayside Neighborhood CT 5350017.00

Population 2016

2,731,517

7,906

Average household size

2.4

1.7

Adults with BA

36.4%

49.8%

Median household income

$65,829

$63,104

Low income rate

20.2%

21.2%

Unemployment rate

8.2%

6.8%

Median home value

$601,922

$421,515

90  PART I    Governance and Political Economy In 2017, Waterfront Toronto issued a Request for Proposals for the redevelopment of Quayside, a 12-acre parcel on Toronto’s eastern waterfront into a “globally significant demonstration project” (Waterfront Toronto, 2017, p. 9). Waterfront Toronto wanted more than just a builder: It sought “an innovation and financial partner” (Waterfront Toronto, 2017, p. 6). The Request for Proposals acknowledged that the agency lacked the inhouse expertise and financial capacity to accomplish all its objectives. It was also expected that this initial mixed-use neighborhood could set the stage for the remaining 700 acres of eastern waterfront. The winning proposal was submitted by Sidewalk Labs, a Google affiliated company headquartered in New York City. Sidewalk’s 200-page proposal (Sidewalk Toronto, 2018) called for the creation of a neighborhood that embraced technologies (‘built from the Internet up’) that would realize maximum benefits and efficiencies through constant monitoring of activities. Not only would modular buildings allow for their adaptation to changing circumstances over time, but quotidian adjustments could also be made to increase comfort and energy efficiency. The traffic patterns on streets could be adjusted in response to fluctuations in volume, direction and mode. The public realm was seen as a critical component of Quayside; for example, to encourage increased activity in the public spaces, the proposal called for inducing climate protection devices that would substantially increase the time when people would be comfortable outdoors. Several aspects of the proposed Quayside neighborhood would set it apart from other developments. The high density, mixed-use characteristics of Quayside would make it vibrant and attractive. The buildings, some up to 30 stories tall, would be wood framed. Private vehicles would be discouraged in favor of walking, bicycling, public transit, and ride sharing services. This shift away from private vehicles would be fostered by an attractive public realm, priority pedestrian areas and bike lanes and climate adaptations. Quayside would also incorporate technological advances that, although not readily visible, would be instrumental in achieving Waterfront Toronto’s objectives with respect to realizing a climate positive development. An extensive digital network to collect, analyze and adjust these systems would be provided. Because of the experimental nature of the new technologies, one commentator described Quayside residents, workers, and visitors as “guinea pigs” (Sauter, 2018). Sidewalk released a 1,500-page Master Innovation and Development Plan in June (Sidewalk Toronto, 2019). As proposed, Quayside would include some 2.65 million square feet of built space that would accommodate 3,952 workers and 2,670 residential units, along with retail, social infrastructure, and public spaces. The Master Innovation and Development Plan also outlined a plan for development of a second parcel, the nearby Villiers West neighborhood, proposed as the site of an innovation center that would

CHAPTER 2   The Politics of Urban Economic Development in a New Era   91

include Google’s Canadian headquarters and a new Urban Innovation Institute. Ultimately, Villiers West would include space for 7,680 jobs and 1,720 residences. Sidewalk Toronto would be the developer for these two neighborhoods (Sidewalk Toronto, 2019, Vol. 3, p. 87). The two areas would see a decrease in the total square footage built of about 7% from the initial Sidewalk proposal. Commercial development, however, would be increased by more than a million square feet, an increase of 150%. In addition to the Villiers West development, Sidewalk’s Master Innovation and Development Plan outlined its vision for the redevelopment of an additional 155 acres to be known as the Innovative Design and Economic Acceleration District. The District would be a major initiative, accelerating job growth and investment. When fully developed, it would include almost 44,000 jobs and 30,470 dwelling units. Sidewalk Toronto would be the lead developer for the Advanced Systems that would extend throughout the Innovative Design and Economic Acceleration District— the power grid, thermal grid, waste management, stormwater management, freight management, dynamic streets, parking management, digital access and mobility systems (Sidewalk Toronto, 2019). Sidewalk Labs argued that the inclusion of the entire Innovative Design and Economic Acceleration District was crucial to the success of the development of the first two neighborhoods. Many of the proposed innovative Advanced Systems are not economically viable at the scale of one or even two neighborhoods, but without them the Quayside proposal would not be as innovative and leading edge as either Sidewalk or Waterfront Toronto desires. Two among the Sidewalk justifications to proceed at the scale of the entire Eastern Waterfront, were the economies of scale required to support the development of a mass-timber production system, and the need to reap value added at this large scale to finance a Light Rail Transit (LRT), connecting the sector to Downtown Toronto. Consequently, Sidewalk was prepared to invest heavily in the development of the Innovative Design and Economic Acceleration District. While Waterfront Toronto’s Request for Proposals described Quayside as a pilot that could provide a model for the redevelopment of the entire Eastern Waterfront, the Sidewalk Labs’ Master Innovation and Development Plan makes their participation in the subsequent development of the 155-acre Innovative Design and Economic Acceleration District essential. Sidewalk also requested 15 different regulatory adjustments and reforms, including pre-approval of flexible development regulations and innovative technology applications (Sidewalk Toronto, 2019, Vol. 3, pp. 224–226). The Master Innovation and Development Plan proposed a financial partnership between Sidewalk and the public sector, primarily Waterfront Toronto and the City of Toronto (Sidewalk Toronto, 2019, Vol. 3). Sidewalk would invest $825 million in the Innovative Design and Economic Acceleration

92  PART I    Governance and Political Economy district, plus $400 million for optional credit support and $80 million for an off-site tall timber factory (Sidewalk Toronto, 2019, Vol. 3, pp. 154–155). In return, Sidewalk Toronto would receive revenue from a variety of sources (Sidewalk Toronto, 2019, Vol. 3, pp. 174–179). For example, it would be exempted from certain development charges and fees. The company would also share in the increased land values and receive fees based on the costs of municipal infrastructure and advanced systems. Sidewalk Toronto would also earn fees for advisory services and for reaching performance targets. The amounts of these fees will be negotiated in the Implementation Agreement. If Sidewalk Toronto advanced funds for infrastructure construction, they would be repaid at market interest rates. Note as well that Sidewalk Labs stood to benefit financially from the devices it would invent for the Toronto water-front development, as well as from the reputation of this project and the worldwide commissions that would ensue. Finally, Sidewalk Toronto sought performance fees to recoup some of the tax revenues generated by the developments it will catalyze. The Sidewalk Labs proposal encountered a good deal of public opposition, considerably more than Amazon did in Long Island City. Some of the issues, such as concerns about guarantees of privacy (Kirkwood, 2019) and the requested waiver of public development regulations (Sauter, 2018; Sidewalk Toronto, 2018) are specific to Quayside. There was also a feeling among civic organizations and a newly elected provincial administration that the Master Innovation and Development Plan did not respect the original terms of the Waterfront Toronto Request for Proposals and as such constituted a ‘land grab’ (Benzie & Rider, 2019). Other issues, such as complaints about inadequate public consultation and insufficient affordable housing opportunities (Bliss, 2019), are more general. After several months of negotiation, Sidewalk Labs and Waterfront Toronto reached a tentative agreement on a list of critical threshold issues. The development was scaled back to the original 12-acre parcel, deferring decisions on the rest of the eastern waterfront until a later date. Sidewalk Labs, in partnership with a development company, would be responsible for the vertical development, while Waterfront Toronto would install the basic public infrastructure. Additional commitments of public resources would be negotiated separately. Many of the proposed innovations, such as district heating, waiver of development regulations and the creation of a data trust, were eliminated. In February 2020, Waterfront Toronto launched a consultation process on the revised proposals of Sidewalk, with the aim of arriving at a final decision on the development on 31 May 2020. Even though the company had spent two and a half years and over 50 million dollars planning and promoting their proposal, on 7 May 2020, Sidewalk Labs announced that they were ending their involvement on the Toronto waterfront, citing the uncertainties resulting from the COVID-19

CHAPTER 2   The Politics of Urban Economic Development in a New Era   93

pandemic (Doctoroff, 2020; Passifiume, 2020). Different interpretations were advanced to make sense of the Sidewalk decision. There was, of course, a possible downward COVID-induced Toronto real estate trajectory. But the decision was taken at a time when it was still too early to fathom the long-term economic consequences of the pandemic (O’Kane, 2020). Another possible explanation was that Sidewalk never felt comfortable with the idea of limiting its Toronto waterfront presence to the 12-acre Quayside site. Finally, the view was advanced that Sidewalk was frustrated by the political dynamics of Toronto, involving the participation of local politicians and community groups in debates about the Toronto waterfront (Lorinc, 2020).

Findings The review of these two economic development mega-deals suggests that, despite important differences, they share important attributes. Both Amazon’s New York HQ2 and Quayside were proposed for large and prosperous cities. Both projects were located on the fringe of their respective core business areas. Although both developments are large scale, they would represent only a small part of the total growth in their respective areas. Table 3 provides a summary of the key attributes of each of the projects. The types of incentives offered to the developers highlight the cumulative or path dependent nature of local economic development policies. Because Amazon withdrew from its development in Long Island City, less can be said about what the balance between the public sector’s actual financial contribution and its returns might have been. Amazon asked each community to indicate what incentives they would be willing to give. New York City and State initially offered $3 billion in incentives to secure a $5 billion investment. Presumably, because Amazon would be splitting its investment and job creation between two locations, the value of the incentives would also decrease. Bringing employment opportunities to the project location was an important component of both proposals. For Amazon, the development was all about jobs, well-paying, technical jobs. Access to a high-tech workforce appears to have been most decisive site selection criterion for Amazon. The New York and Washington metropolitan areas have the largest number of high tech (computer and mathematical occupations) workers in the country (Berube, 2018). The ready availability of existing sites and connectivity also seem to have been important factors. The value of incentives, however, including grants, tax abatements and infrastructure investments, does not appear to have been a decisive factor in Amazon’s decision. Locations close to the ones selected (Newark and Montgomery County) offered much larger incentive packages. As is often

94  PART I    Governance and Political Economy TABLE 3 Summary Comparison of Projects

Amazon

Incentives sought

Nature of development

Who would benefit

Who would lose

Land

Office headquarters

Amazon

Lower income residents

Grants

Highly paid jobs

Skilled, high tech workers

Foregone city revenue

Tax abatements

Reduced public capacity for services

Infrastructure investment Sidewalk

Land

Office headquarters

Sidewalk Toronto

Low income residents

Revenue capture

High density

Luxury residential market

Foregone city revenue

Regulatory flexibility

Mixed use neighborhood

High tech workers

Reduced public capacity for services

Development fee exemptions

Technology test site

LRT

Smart infrastructure Public spaces

the case with economic development incentives (Sands & Reese, 2012), the incentives were frosting on the cake. Sidewalk Labs sought less in terms of traditional incentives but rather asked for expedited development approvals and participation in project revenues that would normally accrue to the government entities. Rather than asking for large payments from local governments, Sidewalk Labs offered to advance funds for the construction of the LRT connecting Quayside to Union Station. The developers of these two projects also differed with respect to how they dealt with community reactions. Amazon’s New York HQ2 encountered community opposition which Amazon cited as a reason for abandoning this location (Goodman, 2019). Amazon’s approach to dealing with local governments in other locations strongly suggests that they were unlikely to make additional concessions to the community (Weise et al., 2019). The public opposition to the Sidewalk proposal was also

CHAPTER 2   The Politics of Urban Economic Development in a New Era   95

substantial, but they continued to negotiate with Waterfront Toronto, eventually conceding a number of significant components of the proposals contained in their Master Innovation and Development Plan (Kirkwood, 2019; Zarum, 2019). The projects discussed here involve high density developments serving largely high-end clienteles. As a result, the primary beneficiaries of both projects are skilled, educated, and better off residents, and of course, the bottom lines of the high-tech firms involved. Existing businesses, commercial and residential real estate interests are likely losers, as are middle and lower income residents who cannot afford the new housing or do not have the skills to benefit from the high tech jobs, and the general public that receives services from local governments with reduced revenues as a result of tax and fee diversion and the expenditures necessary to support the incentives. There is little evidence that the emphasis on high tech firms and clearer focus on higher income residents represents a new economic development paradigm. In our view, Big Tech has intensified the economic development incentive process, but has not fundamentally changed it.

Conclusion We now return to the questions raised at the beginning of this article: First, does the focus on high tech firms represent a new local economic development paradigm, one that introduces new policy instruments to attract high end jobs? Communities continue to offer standard packages of incentives and abatements. Attempts to justify public investments in economic development are infrequent and often limited. For example, property tax abatements may be rationalized by projections of future income tax revenue, with little concern for indirect costs such as increased congestion and declining housing affordability. Amazon’s original HQ2 proposal could be easily justified by the income tax revenue derived from an annual payroll of $750 million. The Sidewalk Labs proposal did incorporate some innovative approaches to the structuring of public private partnerships, but these were not acceptable to Waterfront Toronto. One aspect of local economic development that may be changing with the emerging emphasis on high tech and new economy investments is the shift from economic development focused on distressed and declining areas to the already prosperous areas where the Big Tech firms want to be anyway. It is not surprising that these examples are drawn from cities that are generally regarded as global and prosperous. While New York City and Toronto experience significant problems of high housing costs, congestion and strained public services, there is little indication that these issues have made them unattractive to private developers. If the thriving markets in these cities require billions of dollars of incentives to attract investments, what

96  PART I    Governance and Political Economy does this say about cities like Detroit, Cleveland, or Winnipeg? How much subsidy would be required to make these weak market cities attractive to large scale investments? Second, will Big Tech shift the balance of power between the public and private sectors, as well as among the communities seeking to attract new economy firms, those that are high tech and information intensive? The decision to abandon each of these projects was made by the developer, rather than by the government. Indeed, local government officials expressed regret over the cancellation (de Blasio, 2019; “Sidewalk Labs has walked away,” 2020). But these cases may not be indicative of a permanent or widespread paradigm shift. Amazon had invested little in the New York site and clearly had plenty of other available options. The decision to concentrate on the Northern Virginia location returned Amazon to their original HQ2 plan. While Sidewalk Labs invested heavily in the Quayside proposal, their objectives were much grander than Amazon’s. Sidewalk Labs sought development control to well over a square mile of well-located land in a prosperous community, participating in what are traditionally municipal revenue streams, access to detailed behavioral data and creating a test bed for technological innovations (that could be marketed to other cities). Such a proposal would likely be attractive to a community that was truly desperate, the sort of community unlikely to attract the interest of Big Tech. Big Tech firms, such as Alphabet, are perhaps uniquely qualified to pursue these types of economic development strategies. Google has large cash resources that are readily available to be invested in projects such as the LRT. Obviously, it is easy for Sidewalk to obtain a commitment for the relocation of Google’s offices to the District. Alphabet Companies are involved with development of autonomous vehicles and other technology applications that could be deployed in Quayside. Third, how does this ‘reaching for the top’ in terms of firms and job categories and the economic status of residents differ from the previous economic development attempts to attract middle-class manufacturing jobs? It seems likely that the Big Tech firms will increasingly play a major role, seeking mega-deals that will support potentially transformative projects. Here we would include not only companies like Google and Amazon, but also advanced manufacturing firms which incorporate significant amounts of technology in their products, including motor vehicle and aerospace companies, computer chip manufacturers, battery and solar power companies. These firms will likely continue to expand, requiring large capital investments for which public subsidies and incentives will be sought. But not all communities can compete effectively in this arena. Cities and neighborhoods within them that are already attractive and prosperous will garner the lion’s share of these new economic prizes. An important consequence of these trends will be widening inequalities. Prosperous communities will attract the lion’s share of investment and new

CHAPTER 2   The Politics of Urban Economic Development in a New Era   97

jobs, both because they can offer richer incentive packages and because they are the locations the tech elite prefer. Struggling communities will fall further behind with some, out of desperation, continuing to offer incentive packages that they can ill afford. Big Tech firms will enjoy lower taxes with other taxpayers bearing the subsidy burden through higher taxes and reduced service levels. Social equity objectives occupied a more important place among prior economic development policies than they do within the present emanation of such policies. They indeed attempted to attract investments to deprived areas and to create middle-class jobs, generally in the manufacturing sector. The middle-class nature of these jobs was in itself the main economic and social achievement of this form of economic development (LeRoy, 2005). The types of policies described here contrast with this earlier model of economic development. They are directed at the most economically appealing cities and urban sectors therein and create jobs for highly paid people and residential areas mostly dedicated to the rich, raising doubts about the distributive effects of these policies. Most open to criticism is the allocation of different forms of public sector support to the most profitable firms and to the highly paid employment and high-income residents attracted to these developments. If an argument can be made for the filtering down through the economy of the wealth generated by these developments, it is important to point out that most of the employment created by their multiplier effects is in low-wage service jobs. Furthermore, in the inflated housing markets of prosperous global cities, the arrival of such developments can cause a crowding out of medium—and low-income residents, thus exacerbating the consequences of income polarization. In short, the ‘new’ economic development paradigm fostered by the drive for high tech firms appears to lead to bigger deals with public support but without public input, using the same old incentives, by wealthy cities, to wealthy firms, for the benefit of wealthy residents.

Conflict of Interests The authors declare no conflict of interests.

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98  PART I    Governance and Political Economy Belderbos, R., Du, H. S., & Goerzen, A. (2017). Global cities, connectivity, and the location choice of MNC regional headquarters. Journal of Management Studies, 54(8). https://doi.org/10.1111/joms.12290 Benzie, R., & Rider, D. (2019, August 13). Sidewalk Labs a “terrible deal,” Ford says: Premier questions public cost of company’s desire to expand beyond original waterfront site. Toronto Star. Retrieved from https://www.pressreader.com/canada/ toronto-star/20190813/281509342821825 Berger, T., & Frey, C. B. (2015). Did the Computer Revolution shift the fortunes of US cities? Technology shocks and the geography of new jobs. Regional Science and Urban Economics, 57, 38–45. Berube, A. (2018). For Amazon, HQ2 decision was about talent, talent, talent. Brookings. Retrieved from https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2018/11/13/for-amazonhq2-location-decision-was-about-talent-talent-talent Bliss, L. (2019, February 25). Critics vow to block Sidewalk Labs’ controversial smart city in Toronto. CityLab. Retrieved from https://www.citylab.com/equity/2019/02/ block-sidewalk-labs-quayside-toronto-smart-city-resistance/583477 Bluestone, B. (2003). Beyond the ruins: The meanings of deindustrialization. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Campbell, J. (2018). Amazon HQ2: $3 billion in state, city tax breaks draws company to New York. Rochester Democrat and Chronicle. Retrieved from https:// eu.democratandchronicle.com/story/news/politics/albany/2018/11/13/new-yorkamazon-incentives-billion/1986979002 de Blasio, B. (2019, February 16). The path Amazon rejected. The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/16/opinion/amazon-new-yorkbill-de-blasio.html Doctoroff, D. (2020). Why we are no longer pursuing the Quayside project-and what’s next for Sidewalk Labs. Medium. Retrieved from https://medium.com/sidewalk-talk/ why-were-no-longer-pursuing-the-quayside-project-and-what-s-next-for-sidewalklabs-9a61de3fee3a Eisinger, P. K. (1988). The rise of the entrepreneurial state. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Filion, P., Reese, L. A., & Sands, G. (2019). Progressive economic development policies: A square PED in a round hole? Urban Affairs Quarterly. https://doi.org/ 10.1177/1078087419886362 Florida, R. (2002). The rise of the creative class. New York, NY: Basic Books. Glaeser, E. L., & Saiz, A. (2004). The rise of the skilled city. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press. Goodman, J. D. (2019, February 14). Amazon pulls out of planned New York City headquarters. New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/14/ nyregion/amazon-hq2-queens.html Grodach, C. (2011). Art spaces in community and economic development: Connections to neighborhoods, artists, and the cultural economy. Journal of Planning Education and Research, 31(1), 74–85. Hill, E. W., Wolman, H. L., Kowalczky, K., & St. Clair, T. (2012). Forces affecting city population growth or decline: The effects of interregional and intermunicipal competition. In A. Mallach (Ed.), Defining a future for American cities experiencing severe population loss (pp. 35–85). New York, NY: American Assembly.

CHAPTER 2   The Politics of Urban Economic Development in a New Era   99 Jansa, J. M., & Gray, V. (2017). Captured development: Industry influence and state economic development subsidies in the Great recession era. Economic Development Quarterly, 31(1), 50–64. Kirkwood, I. (2019, February 15). Leaked documents reveal Sidewalk Labs wants a lot more than Quay-side. Betakit Canadian Startup News. Retrieved from https://betakit.com/leaked-documents-reveal-sidewalk-labs-wants-a-lot-more-thanquayside Kodrzycki, Y. K., & Muñoz, A. P. (2015). Economic distress and resurgence in U.S. central cities: Concepts, causes, and policy levers. Economic Development Quarterly, 29(2), 113–134. Kwak, J. (2014). Cultural capture and the financial crisis. In D. Carpenter & D. A. Moss (Eds.), Preventing regulatory capture: Special interest influence and how to limit it (pp. 71–98). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. LeRoy, G. (2005). The Great American jobs scam. San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers. LeRoy, G. (2018, November 16). The Amazon deal is even worse than it looks and will cost NY more than it thinks. Fast Company. Retrieved from https://www. fastcompany.com/90269146/the-amazon-deal-is-even-worse-than-it-looks-and-willcost-ny-more-than-it-thinks Lorinc, J. (2020, May 7). Sidewalk Labs steps away from Toronto waterfront. Spacing. Retrieved from http://spacing.ca/toronto/2020/05/07/lorinc-sidewalk-steps-awayfrom-toronto-waterfront Lowe, N. J. (2012). Beyond the deal: Using industrial recruitment as a strategic tool for manufacturing development. Economic Development Quarterly, 28(4), 287–299. Markusen, A. R., & Nesse, K. (2007). Institutional and political determinants of incentive competition. In A. Markusen (Ed.), Reining in the competition for capital (pp. 1–42). Kalamazoo, MI: W. E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research. Matsakis, L. (2018). Why Amazon’s search for a second headquarters backfired. Wired. Retrieved from https://www.wired.com/story/amazon-hq2-search-backfired McCartney, R., & O’Connell, J. (2019, February 14). Amazon drops plans to build headquarters in New York City. The Washington Post. Retrieved from https:/www. washingtonpost.com/trafficandcommting/amazon-drops-plan-to-build-headquartersin-new-york-city/2019/02/14/b7457efa-3078-11e O’Kane, J. (2020, May 24). Sidewalk’s end: How the downfall of a Toronto ‘smart city’ plan began long before COVID-19. Toronto Globe and Mail. Retrieved from https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-sidewalks-end-how-the-downfallof-a-toronto-smart-city-plan-began Passifiume, B. (2020, May 7). Sidewalk Labs pulling plug on Quayside project in Toronto. Toronto Sun. Retrieved from https://torontosun.com/news/local-news/sidewalk-labspulling-plug-on-quayside-project-in-toronto Peters, A., & Fisher, P. (2004). The failures of economic development incentives. Journal of the American Planning Association, 70, 27–37. Posner, R. A. (2014). The concept of regulatory capture: A short, inglorious history. In D. Carpenter & D. A. Moss (Eds.), Preventing regulatory capture: Special interest influence and how to limit it (pp. 49–56). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Reese, L. A. (2006). Do we really need another typology? Cluster of local economic development strategies. Economic Development Quarterly, 20, 268–376.

100  PART I    Governance and Political Economy Reese, L. A., & Ye, M. (2011). Policy versus place luck: Achieving local economic prosperity. Economic Development Quarterly, 25(3), 221–236. Ritholz, B. (2019). HQ2: Understanding what happened and why. Ritholz. Retrieved from https://ritholz.com/2019/hq2-understanding-what-happened-why Rodríguez-Pose, A., & Wilkie, C. (2016). Context and the role of policies to attract foreign R&D in Europe. European Planning Studies, 24(11), 2014–2035. Saiz, M., & Clarke, S. E. (2013). Economic development and infrastructure policy. In V. Gray, R. L. Hanson, & T. Kousser (Eds.), Politics in the American states: A comparative analysis (10th ed., pp. 501–532). Thousand Oaks, CA: CQ Press. Sands, G., & Reese, L. A. (2012). Money for nothing: Industrial tax abatements and economic development. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Sauter, M. (2018, February 13). Google’s Guinea-pig city. The Atlantic. Retrieved from https:// www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/02/googles-guinea-pig-city/552932 Seidman, K. F. (2005). Economic development finance. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Sidewalk Labs has walked away: That’s a lost opportunity for Toronto. (2020, May 7). Toronto Star. Retrieved from https://www.thestar.com/opinion/editorials/2020/05/07/ sidewalk-labs-has-walked-away-thats-a-lost-opportunity-for-toronto.html Urban Planning, 2020, Volume 5, Issue 3, Pages 392–402 Sidewalk Toronto. (2018). Vision sections of RFP submission. Toronto: Sidewalk Toronto. Retrieved from https://sidewalktoronto.ca/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/ Sidewalk-Labs-Vision-Sections-of-RFP-Submission.pdf Sidewalk Toronto. (2019). Master Innovation and Development Plan. Sidewalk Toronto. Retrieved from https://www.sidewalktoronto.ca/documents State of New York. (2017). New York Metro Area Amazon HQ2 RFP response. New York, NY: State of New York. Retrieved from https://www.documentcloud.org/ documents/5513775-New-York-City-Amazon-HQ2-Proposal.html Statistics Canada. (2016). Census profile, 2016 census. Statistics Canada. Retrieved from https://www12. statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2016/dp-pd/ prof/index. cfm?Lang=E Stern, M., & Seifert, S. (2010). Cultural clusters: The implications of cultural assets agglomeration for neighborhood revitalization. Journal of Planning Education and Research, 29(3), 262–279. Tassonyi, A. T. (2005). Local economic development: Theory and the Ontario experience (ITP Paper 0511). Toronto: University of Toronto Rothman School of Management Institute for International Business. Warner, M. E., & Zheng, L. (2013). Business incentive adoption in the recession. Economic Development Quarterly, 12(2), 90–101. Waterfront Toronto. (2017). Request for proposals innovation and funding partner for the Quay-side development opportunity. Toronto: Sidewalk Toronto. Retrieved from https://sidewalktoronto.ca/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Waterfront-­TorontoRFP-No.-2017-13.pdf Weise, K., Fernandez, M., & Eligon, J. (2019, March 3). Amazon’s hard bargain extends far beyond New York. New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes. com/2019/03/03/technology/amazon-new-york-politics-jobs.html Zarum, L. (2019, April 24). #BlockSidewalk’s war against Google in Canada. The Nation. Retrieved from https://www.thenation.com/article/google-toronto-sidewalk-gentrification

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6 Can Politicians Bargain with Business? Paul Kantor and H. V. Savitch† In the summer of 1989, United Air Lines announced it was planning a new maintenance hub that would bring nearly a billion dollars in investment and generate over 7,000 jobs for the region lucky enough to attract it. Within a few short months, officials in over 90 localities were competing for the bonanza and were tripping over one another in an effort to lure United. Denver offered $115 million in incentives and cash, Oklahoma City sought to raise $120 million, and localities in Virginia offered a similar amount. The competition for United was so keen that cities began to bid against one another and asked that their bids be kept secret. United was so delighted at the level of bidding that it repeatedly delayed its decision in anticipation the offers would get even better. Nearly two years later, city officials in nine finalists were enhancing their incentives, courting United executives, and holding their breaths. Reflecting on the competition, Louisville Mayor Jerry Abramson quipped, “We haven’t begun to offer up our firstborn yet, but we’re getting close. Right now we are into siblings.”1 Except for the extremity of the case, there is nothing new about cities questing for private capital. Cities compete with one another for tourism, foreign trade, baseball franchises, and federal grants. Yet, there is another side to this behavior. Although 93 cities competed for the United hub, many others did not, and some cities would have resisted the corporate intrusion (Etzkowitz and Mack 1976; Savitch 1988). When United stalled and raised the ante, Kentucky’s governor angrily withdrew, complaining that he would “not continue this auction, this bidding war. There is a point at which you draw the line” (“Governor turns down UAL,” Courier-Journal, 18 October 1991). In Denver, the legislature’s majority leader protested, saying, “United has a ring and is pulling Colorado by the nose.” With those remarks and heightening resentment, public opinion began to pull the state away from the lure of United (“UAL bidding goes on,” Courier-Journal, 22 October 1991).

† Paul Kantor, H. V. Savitch, ‘Can Politicians Bargain with Business?’, Urban Affairs Review, 29.2, pp. 23–255, copyright © 1993 by SAGE Publications. Reprinted by Permission of SAGE Publications, Inc.

102  PART I    Governance and Political Economy Such cases do not seem uncommon. Although many cities are willing to build sports stadia, others have turned down the opportunity. For instance, when Fort Wayne, Indiana, declined to go beyond its offer of a shortterm low-interest loan to obtain a minor-league baseball team, the franchise was taken elsewhere (Rosentraub and Swindell 1990). Although officials in some cities trip over one another in efforts to attract business by lowering taxes, officials in others raise them. Over the last three years, Los Angeles, New York, and Denver have increased business taxes. Notwithstanding high taxes and locational costs, business continues to seek out such cities as San Francisco, Tokyo, London, Toronto, and Frankfurt. Nevertheless, the literature on urban politics has not systematically examined such “nondecisional” cases (Bachrach and Baratz 1962) to probe the precise circumstances under which local governments can influence the capital investment process… …We propose that questions of how, when, and why local government can influence economic development are best answered by treating political control as something that springs from bargaining advantages that the state has in political and economic exchange relationships with business. Variations in local-government influence are strongly tied to the ways in which the larger political economy distributes particular bargaining resources between the public and private sectors. Following Lindblom (1977), we find that it is useful to regard this context as a liberal-democratic system in which there is a division of labor between business and government (Kantor 1988; Elkin 1987). The private sector is responsible for the production of wealth in a market system in which choices over production and exchange are determined by price mechanisms. For its part, the public sector is organized along polyarchal lines (Dahl 1971; Dahl and Lindblom 1965) in which public decisions are subject to popular control. Public officials may be viewed as primarily responsible for the management of political support for governmental undertakings; business leaders can be considered essentially managers of market enterprises. This perspective suggests that even though public and private control systems are theoretically separate, in reality they are highly interdependent. So far as government is concerned, the private sector produces economic resources that are necessary for the well-being of the political communityincluding jobs, revenues for public programs, and political support that is likely to flow to public authorities from popular satisfaction with economic prosperity and security. For business, the public sector is important because it provides forms of intervention into the market that are necessary for the  promotion of economic enterprise but that the private sector cannot provide on its own. Such interventions include inducements that enable private

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investors to take risks (tax abatements and tax credits), the resolution of private conflicts that threaten social or economic stability (courts, mediation services), and the creation of an infrastructure or other forms of support (highways, workforce training). Conceptualized in this manner, business and government must engage in exchange relationships (bargaining) to realize common goals. This is done by using bargaining advantages that derive from three dimensions or spheres of interdependence: market conditions, popular-control systems, and publicintervention mechanisms… Our analysis suggests that there is substantial variation among local governments in their ability to bargain. We also suggest that bargaining advantages tend to be cumulative-that is, the more advantages a city holds, the greater its ability to bargain. Finally, we suggest that because bargaining is a product of political and economic circumstance, so is urban development. Although it may not be possible for a city to manipulate all the variables affecting its bargaining position, most cities can manipulate some and thereby shape its own future…

Markets and Public Control of Urban Development There is little doubt that businesses’ greatest bargaining resource in urban development is its control over private wealth in the capital investment process. It is this dimension of business-government relations that Peterson’s (1981) market-centered model of local politics describes. The logic of this model is that cities compete for capital investment by seeking to attract mobile capital to the community; failure to meet the conditions demanded by business for investment leads to the “automatic punishing recoil” (Lindblom 1982) of the marketplace as business disinvests. This notion has been variously interpreted to suggest that business inherently holds a dominant position (Fainstein et al. 1986; Mollenkopf 1983; Logan and Molotch 1987; Jones and Bachelor 1986; Kantor 1988). Although the market-centered model is a powerful tool for analyzing development politics, it does not fully capture the bargaining relationships that logically derive from it. Specifically, the market perspective tends to highlight only those advantages that accrue to business. Yet, the marketplace works in two directions, not one. If we look at specific market conditions and bargaining demands, it becomes apparent that government also can use the market to obtain leverage over business. Thus we will present a number of common market-centered arguments and show their other side.

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The Cities-Lose-if-Business-Wins Argument In the market model, public and private actors represent institutions that compete to achieve rival goals. Business pursues public objectives only insofar as they serve private needs; if important business needs are not met, local government experiences the discipline of the marketplace as capital and labor seek alternative locations. Yet, in this description of market dynamics, cases in which local government and business may also share the same goals (as distinct from the same interests) are ignored; in such instances the market model no longer indicates business advantage in the development process. Thus a local government may have an interest in raising public revenue by increasing retail sales while shop-keepers and investors have an interest in maximizing profits. Though their interests are different, they may share the common goal of bringing about higher sales through expanded development. When this happens, bargaining between government and business shifts from rivalry over competing goals to settling differences over how to facilitate what already has been agreed on. This kind of scenario enhances the value of bargaining resources that are mostly owned by the public sector. Development politics focuses on such things as the ability to amass land, grant legal privileges and rights, control zoning, provide appropriate infrastructure, and-not least-enlist public support. Because alternative means of promoting growth are important choices (Logan and Swanstrom 1990), substantial bargaining leverage over development outcomes is placed in the hands of those who manage the governmental process, a point that Mollenkopf (1983) underscored in his study of urban renewal politics. Yet, this partial escape from the market often is not recognized. Peterson (1981) considered the sharing of interests and goals to be one and the same. Other scholars have often assumed that there is an inherent conflict between private and public goals (Stone and Sanders 1987; Logan and Swanstrom 1990; Swanstrom 1986). However, a strong case can be made that business and government often share common goals. Although they cannot logically share interests, public officials, motivated by different stakes, frequently choose to pursue economic objectives that are also favored by business (Cummings 1988). Although some critics reject progrowth values, these values tend to be supported broadly by local electorates (Logan and Molotch 1987, 50-98; Vaughn 1979; Crenson 1971). To take a different tack on former head of General Motors Charles Wilson’s aphorism, scholars may be too anxious to suggest that if it is good for General Motors, it must be bad for Detroit. Yet, local officials and their publics do not always share this logic. When government and business perceive common goals, such perceptions can have a powerful effect on opportunities for political control over the urban economy. Under these

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conditions, the ability of political authorities to create political support for specific programs and their willingness to use public authority to assist business can become important bargaining resources for achieving their own interests. At the very least, the ex tent to which agreement between business and local government is a byproduct of political choice rather than of economic constraint should be a premise for empirical investigation instead of an a priori conclusion.

The Capital Mobility Argument This argument encompasses an assumption that bargaining advantages accrue to business as it becomes more mobile. Historically, private capital was more dependent on the local state than it is today (Kanto 1988). Technological advances in production, communications, and transportation have enhanced the ability of business to move more easily and rapidly. Changes in the organization of capital, especially the rise of multilocational corporations, have increased business mobility and made urban locations interchangable. Automation, robotics, and the postindustrial revolution are supposed to enhance capital mobility. Fixed capital has been nudged aside by a new postindustrial technology of flexible capital (Hill 1989; Parkinson, Foley, and Judd 1989). It would seem to follow that increasing capital mobility must favor business interests. Yet, this conclusion does not always follow, if one considers specific cities and businesses that are caught up in this process of economic globalization. Capital is, in fact, not always very portable. Although cities are frequently viewed as interchangeable by some corporations, many cities retain inherent advantages of location (e.g., Brussels), of agglomeration (e.g., New York), of technological prowess (e.g., Grenoble), or of political access (e.g., Washington, D.C.). The dispersion of capital has triggered a countermovement to create centers that specialize in the communication, coordination, and support of far-flung corporate units. Larger global cities have captured these roles. Much of postindustrial capital has put enormous sunk costs into major cities. One of the more conspicuous examples is the Canadian development firm of Olympia and York, which has invested billions of dollars in New York, London, Ontario, and a host of other cities. As Olympia and York teeters on the edge of collapse, banks, realty interests, and mortgage brokers are also threatened. It is not easy for any of these interests to pull up stakes. There has been a fairly stable tendency for corporate headquarters operations, together with the ancillary services on which headquarters depend, to gravitate to large cities that have acquired the status of world business centers (Sassen 1988; Noyelle and Stanback 1984). New York’s downtown and midtown, London’s financial district and its docklands, Paris’s La Defense, and Tokyo’s Shinjuku are some outstanding examples of postindustrialism that [ha.ve] generated billions in fixed investments.

106  PART I    Governance and Political Economy Movement by individual enterprises away from such established corporate business centers is unlikely for various reasons, including that this kind of change imposes costs on those owning fixed assets in these locations and disrupts established business networks. Cities that have experienced ascendant market positions have not been reluctant to cash in on this. When property values and development pressures in local politicians used the advantage to impose new planning requirements and demand development fees. In San Francisco, a moratorium on high-rise construction regulates the amount and pace of investment and Bailey 1986). In Boston and several other large cities, linkage policies have exacted fees on office development to support moderate-income housing (Dreier 1989). In Paris, differential taxes have been placed on high-rise development and the proceeds used to support city services (Savitch 1988). One should also recognize that market conditions are not immutable. Local governments may be subject to the blandishments of business at an early stage of development, when there is great eagerness for development and capital has wide investment choices. However, once business has made the investment, it may be bound for the long term. Thus bargaining does not stop after the first deal is struck, and the advantages may shift. This occurred in Orlando, Florida, where Disney World exacted early concessions from the local governments, only to be faced with new sets of public demands afterward (Foglesong 1989). Prior to building what is now a vast entertainment complex near Orlando, Disney planners capitalized on their impending investment and won huge concessions from government (including political autonomy, tax advantages, and free infrastructure). However, as Disney transformed the region into a sprawling tourist center, local government demanded that the corporation relinquish autonomy and pressured it to pay for physical improvements. Disney struggled to defeat these demands but eventually conceded. With huge sunk investments, Disney executives had little choice but to accommodate the public sector. So although some industries have grown more mobile, others have not. The issue turns on the relative costs incurred by business and by government when facilities, jobs, and people are moved. How relative costs are assessed and the likelihood that businesses will absorb them influence the respective bargaining postures of business and government.

The City-Cannot-Choose Argument In the market model, business makes investment choices among stationary cities; because cities cannot move, powerful bargaining advantages accrue to business in the urban development process and supposedly this enables them to exact what they want from local governments. Although this is the case it is also true that local communities may have investment choices as

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well. Some local governments can make choices among alternative types of business investment. In particular, economic diversification enables local political authorities to market the community in a particular economic sector (e.g., as a tourist city, as a research or technical center, or as a sound place in which to retire). Further, economic diversification enhances a locality’s ability to withstand economic pressure from any particular segment of the business community. This has occurred in cities as far ranging as Singapore, Rome, enabling them to maintain powerful market positions for years, despite profound changes in the world and national economies. Experience teaches city officials to sense their vulnerabilities and defenses against dominance by a single industry. Through diversification, these cities can gain a good deal of strength, not only in weathering economic fluctuations but in dealing with prospective investors. Houston’s experience after oil prices crashed moved city leaders to develop high-technology and service industries (Feagin 1988). Pittsburgh’s successful effort to clean its air gave that city a new economic complexion. Louisville’s deindustrial crisis was followed by a succession of new investments in health services, a revival in the transportation industry, and a booming business in the arts (Vogel 1990). Diversification, which was so instrumental in strengthening the public hand, was actually made possible by government coalitions with business… The advantages of diversification are most apparent when these cities are compared to localities that are prisoners of relatively monopolistic relations with business. Officials in single-industry towns are strongly inclined to accommodate business demands on matters of development because they lack alternative sources of capital investment. Crenson (1971) found this pattern in Gary, Indiana, where local officials resisted proposals for pollution control because they feared that U.S. Steel would lay off workers. Similarly, Jones and Bachelor (1986) described how Detroit leaders weakened their market position when they sought to preserve the city’s positions as a site for automobile manufacturing. When worldwide changes in the auto industry eroded Detroit’s traditional competitive advantages, political leaders fought to subsidize new plants and to demolish an otherwise viable residential neighborhood. Neither Gary’s steel-centered strategy nor Detroit’s auto-centered strategy has stemmed their economic decline. The lesson for urban politicians is clear: Instead of vainly hanging on to old industry, go for new, preferably clean business. More than most politicians, big-city mayors have learned well and are fast becoming major economic promoters (Savitch and Thomas 1991).

The City-Maximizes-Growth Argument Although the market model is built on the supposition that it is in the interest of cities to promote economic growth, not all localities seek to compete in capital markets. To the extent that communities ignore participation in this

108  PART I    Governance and Political Economy market, they do not have to bargain with business over demands that they might choose to bring to the bargaining table. Santa Barbara, Vancouver, and Stockholm are cities that have insisted growth and instituted extensive land-use controls. These cities are in enviable positions as they deal with business and developers. Aside from major cities, there are smaller communities that do not seek to compete for capital investment such as suburban areas and middle-size cities that after years of expansion, now face environmental degradation. Even if these localities have a stake in maintaining competitive advantages as bedroom communities or steady-state mixed commercial/residential locales, their bargaining relationship with business is more independent than in relatively growth-hungry urban communities (Danielson 1976). University towns, in which a self-sustaining and alert population values its traditions, have man-aged to resist the intrusions of unwanted industry. Coastal cities, which seek to preserve open space, have successfully acquired land or used zoning to curtail development. Moreover, there are cities in which governmental structures reduce financial pressure and are able to resist indiscriminate development. Regionalism and annexation have enabled cities to widen their tax nets, so that business cannot easily play one municipality off against another. Minneapolis-St. Paul, Miami-Dade, and metro Toronto furnish examples of localities banding together to strengthen their fiscal positions and turn down unwanted growth. In Western European and other non-American nations, cities are heavily financed by central government, thereby reducing and sometimes eliminating the pressure to attract development. For these cities, growth only engenders liabilities.

Popular-Control Systems and Urban Development Democratic political institutions not only provide means of disciplining public officials, but they constrain all political actors who seek governmental cooperation or public legitimation in the pursuit of their interests. The reality of this is suggested by the fact that business development projects frequently get stopped when they lack a compelling public rationale and generate significant community opposition. This has occurred under varying conditions and in different types of cities. In Paris, neighborhood mobilization successfully averted developers (Body-Gendrot 1987); in London, communities were able to totally redo urban renewal plans (Christensen 1979); in Amsterdam and Berlin, local squatters defied property owners by taking over abandoned buildings; after the recent earthquake in San Francisco, public opinion prevailed against the community in preventing the reconstruction of a major

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highway. The existence of open, competitive systems of elections and other polyarchal institutions affords a means by which nonbusiness interests are able to influence, however imperfectly, an urban development process in which business power otherwise looms large. But do institutions of popular control afford political authorities a valuable bargaining resource in dealing with business? Are democratic institutions loose cannons that are irrelevant to political bargaining over economic development? From our bargaining perspective, it would appear that these institutions can provide a resource upon which political leaders can draw to impose their own policy preferences when the three conditions described in the following paragraphs are satisfied. First, public approval of bargaining outcomes between government and business must be connected to the capital-investment process. This is often not the case because most private-sector investment decisions are virtually outside the influence of local government. Even when the characteristics of private projects require substantial public-sector cooperation, many decisions are only indirectly dependent on processes of political approval. Economic development decisions have increasingly become insulated from the mainstream processes of city governments as a result of the proliferation of public-benefit corporations (Walsh 1978; Kantor 1993). As power to finance and regulate business development has been ceded to public-benefit corporations, the ability of elected political leaders to build popular coalitions around development issues has shrunk because it makes little sense to appeal to voters on matters that they cannot influence. On the other hand, the importance of this bargaining resource increases as issues spill over their ordinary institutional boundaries and into public or neighborhood arenas. When this occurs, elected political authorities gain bar-gaining advantages by putting together coalitions that can play a vital role in the urban development game. Consequently, even the most powerful public and private developers can be checked by politicians representing hostile voter coalitions. In New York, Robert Moses’s slide from power was made possible by mounting public discontent with his later projects and by the intervention of a popular governor who capitalized on this to undercut Moses s position (Caro 1974); Donald Trump’s plans for the Upper West Side of Manhattan incurred defeats by a coalition of irate residents, local legislators, and a hostile mayor (Savitch 1988); a major highway (Westway) proposal, sponsored by developers, bankers, and other business interests, was defeated by community activists who skillfully used the courts to question the project’s environmental impact. Second, public authorities must have the managerial capability to organize and deliver political support for programs sought by business. Credible bargaining requires organizing a stable constituency whose consent can be

110  PART I    Governance and Political Economy offered to business in a quid pro quo process. However, political authorities clearly differ enormously in their capacity to draw on this resource. In the United States, the decline of machine politics, the weakening of party loyalties and organizations, and the dispersal of political power to interest groups have weakened the capacity of elected political authorities. To some extent, this has been counterbalanced by grassroots and other populist-style movements that have provided a broad base for mayors and other political leaders (Swanstrom 1986; Dreier and Keating 1990; Savitch and Thomas 1991; Capek and Gilderbloom 1992). In contrast, in Western European cities, the stability and cohesion displayed by urban party systems more frequently strengthen political control of development. In Paris, extensive political control over major development projects is related to stable and well-organized political support enjoyed by officials who dominated the central and local governments (Savitch 1988). In London, ideological divisions between Conservative and Labour parties at the local and national levels limit the ability of business interests to win a powerful role, even in cases involving massive redevelopment such as Covent Garden, the construction of motorways, and the docklands renewal adjacent to the financial city. For example, changes in planning the docklands project were tied to shifts in party control at both the national and local levels. Given the political significance of development issues to both major British parties, it was difficult for nonparty interests to offer inducements that were capable of splitting politicians away from their partisan agendas (Savitch 1988). Similarly, even highly fragmented but highly ideological political party systems seem capable of providing a powerful bargaining resource to elected governmental authorities. In Italy, many small parties compete for power at the national and local levels. Although this is sometimes a source of political instability, the relatively stable ideological character of party loyalties means that elected politicians are assured of constituency support. Consequently, this base of political power offers substantial bargaining advantages in dealing with business. According to Molotch and Vicari (1988), this enables elected political authorities to undertake major projects relatively free from business pressure. In Milan, officials planned and built a subway line through the downtown commercial district of the city with minimal involvement of local business. Third, popular-control mechanisms are a valuable bargaining resource when they bind elected leaders to programmatic objectives. If political authorities are not easily disciplined for failure to promote programmatic objectives in development bargaining, business may promote their claims by providing selective incentives (side payments), such as jobs, campaign donations, and other petty favors, to public officials in exchange for their cooperation. When this happens, the bargaining position of city governments

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is undermined by splitting off public officials from their representational roles—and the process of popular control becomes more of a business resource. In America, where partisan attachments are weak and where ethnic, neighborhood, and other particularistic loyalties are strong, political leaders are inclined to put a high value on seeking selective benefits to the neglect of programmatic objectives. Although populist mayors have sometimes succeeded in overcoming these obstacles (Swanstrom 1986; Dreier and Keating 1990), the need to maintain unstable political coalitions that are easily undermined by racial and ethnic rivalries limits programmatic political competition. For example, in Detroit and Atlanta, black mayors have relied heavily on economic development to generate side payments that are used to minimize political opposition; this is facilitated by the symbolic importance that these black mayors enjoy among the heavily black electorates in the two cities. Consequently, they have been able to hold on to power without challenging many business demands (Stone 1989; Hill 1986). In contrast, in Western Europe, where political party systems more frequently discipline public officials to compete on programmatic grounds, bargaining with business is less likely to focus on side payments. As suggested earlier, in France, Italy, and Britain, votes are more often secured by partisan and ideological loyalties and reinforced by progammatic competition than by generating selective incentives for followers. In sum, city governments vary enormously in their capacity to draw on the popular-control process in bargaining over development. The proximity of electoral competition to development, the capability of officials to organize voter support, and the extent of competition over programmatic objectives are crucial factors that weaken or enhance the resources of city governments.

State Intervention and Urban Development … Ironically, integrated national governmental systems appear to enhance local governmental control of urban development, and political structures that decentralize the regulation of market failures afford less local governmental influence. Political systems that accord a powerful urban regulatory role for the national government limit local political authority in urban planning, of course. Yet, these more centralized systems can often work to enhance local governmental bargaining power with the private sector; they do this by making it easier for governments to contain capital movement (overriding private decision making), as well as by permitting localities to draw on the resources, regulatory apparatus, and political support of higher levels of government. Contrasts between American and some Western European cities illustrate the different bargaining implications of each system. The United States is unique in the degree to which urban public capital investment is

112  PART I    Governance and Political Economy highly decentralized. Although the national government provides grants to support highway and other capital projects, this aid is spotty and unconnected to any system of national urban planning. Most important, responsibility for financing most local infrastructure is highly decentralized. Consequently, local and State governments have little choice but to find an administrative means of extracting revenues from the private sector that gives priority to satisfying investor confidence. To market long-term debt, public corporations must contend with investor fears that borrowed funds might be diverted to satisfy political pressures, rather than used for debt repayment. Consequently, major urban infrastructure development is in the hands of public corporations that are only indirectly accountable to urban electorates. These corporations are well known for courting private investors and treating them as constituents rather than as bargaining rivals (Caro 1974; Walsh 1978). The European experience is quite different. There, most capital expenditures are supported by the central government. In France, upwards of 75% of local budgets are financed by central government; in Holland, the figure is 92%. This relieves some of the pressure on local authorities to compete with one another for capital investment to finance basic services. Local governments in Europe are capable of dealing with business from a position of greater Beyond this, government is not as dependent on private capital local can tum to vast financial and regulatory powers to reinforce public bargaining on the part of national and local governmental authorities. The case of La Defense, just outside of Paris, is instructive of how statebusiness relations have been managed in Western Europe. During the 1960s, the national government planned to build another central business district for Paris on the vacant fields of La Defense. Despite skepticism by private investors, funds were allocated by the national government. Just as the project was launched, it was confronted by a fiscal crisis. French business looked on as La Defense reeled from one difficulty to another, and the enterprise was mocked as a “white elephant.” The national government responded quickly, infusing the project with funds from the treasury, from nationalized banks, and from pensions. To buttress these efforts, the government clamped down on new office construction within Paris and used other carrots and sticks to persuade corporations that La Defense was the wave of the future. The effort worked, and La Defense became a premier site as an international business headquarters. La Defense was not built in unique circumstances. To the contrary, it demonstrates the cumulative effect of centralized policy intervention on urban development. It is not unusual for governments throughout Western Europe to pour infrastructure into a particular development area, to freeze the price of surrounding land to prevent speculation, to construct buildings in the same area by relying on public corporations, and to design all the

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structures in the development site. The last public act is usually to invite private investors to compete for the privilege of obtaining space. Only then does bargaining begin. … Comparison of … two antipodal cities [—Amsterdam and Detroit—] permits us to illustrate the cumulative consequences of differences in bargaining resources for political control of business development. To begin with market conditions, Amsterdam has a highly favorable market position because it is at the center of Holland’s economic engine-a horseshoe shaped region called the Randstad. The cities of the Randstad (Amsterdam, Utrecht, Rotterdam, and the Hague) form a powerful and diversified conurbation that drives Holland’s economy, its politics, and its sociocultural life. Amsterdam itself is the nation’s political and financial capital. It also holds light industry, is a tourist and historic center, and is one of northern Europe’s transportation hubs. Although Amsterdam has gone through significant deindustrialization (Jobse and Needham 1987) and has lost 21% of its population since 1960, it has transformed its economy to residential and postindustrial uses and is attractively positioned as one of the keystones of a united Europe. Detroit’s market conditions are dramatically less favorable. It is situated in what was once America’s industrial heartland and what is now balefully called the Rustbelt. Known as America’s Motor City, its economy revolved around automobile manufacture. Deindustrialization and foreign competition have taken a devastating toll. In just three decades, Detroit lost more than half its manufacturing jobs and 38% of its population (Darden et al. 1987). Nearly half the population lives below the poverty line, and one quarter is unemployed (Nethercutt 1987). Detroit has tried to come back to its former prominence by rebuilding its downtown and diversifying its economy for tourism and banking. But those efforts have not changed the city’s market posture. Jobs and the middle class continue to move to surrounding suburbs, and any possible conversion of the Rustbelt economy appears slim when viewed against more attractive opportunities elsewhere. The differences in popular control of these two cities are equally stark. Amsterdam is governed by a 45-member council that is elected by proportional representation (the council also elects a smaller body of aldermen) and is well organized and easily disciplined by the voters. Political parties have cohesive programs geared to conservative, social democratic, centrist, and leftwing orientations. Political accountability is reinforced by a system of elected district councils that represent different neighborhoods of the city. These councils participate in a host of decentralized services including land use, housing, and development. In contrast, Detroit’s government is poorly organized in respect to promoting popular control of economic development. A nine-member city council is elected at large and in nonpartisan balloting. Detroit’s mayor [in 1993], Coleman young, has held power for 16 years and has based his

114  PART I    Governance and Political Economy administration on distributing selective benefits, especially city jobs and contracts, while focusing on downtown project development (Hill 1986; Rich 1991). The system affords scant opportunity for neighborhood expression, and the city’s singular ethnic composition (Detroit is 75% black) is coupled to a politics of black symbolism that impedes programmatic accountability and pluralist opposition. Indeed, one scholar has described Detroit as ruled by a tight-knit elite (Ewen 1978); two other researchers believed that the city’s power was exercised at the peaks of major sectors within the city Gones and Bachelor 1986). The two cities also differ dramatically in respect to modes of policy intervention. Like many European cities, Amsterdam is governed within an integrated national planning scheme. The Dutch rely on three-tier government, at the national, regional, and municipal levels. Goals are set at the uppermost levels, master plans are developed at the regional level, and allocation plans are implemented at the grass roots. A municipalities fund allocates financial support based on population, and over 90% of Amsterdam’s budget is carried by the national treasury. By contrast, Detroit stands very much alone. While “golden corridors” (drawn from Detroit’s former wealth) have sprung up in affluent outskirts, the suburbs now resist the central city. Attempts at creating metropolitan mechanisms to share tax bases or to undertake planning have failed (Darden et al. 1987). Over the years, federal aid has shrunk and now accounts for less than 6% of the city’s budget (Savitch and Thomas 1991). State aid has compensated for some of Detroit’s shortfalls, but like most states, Michigan is at a loss to do anything about the internecine struggles for jobs and investment. Given the cumulative differences along all three dimensions, the bargaining outcomes each city are dramatically opposite. Under the planning and support of national and regional authorities, Amsterdam has managed its deindustrialization-first by moving heavy industry to specific subregions (called concentrated deconcentration) and later by locating housing and light commerce m abandoned wharves and depleted neighborhoods. The Dutch have accomplished this through a combination of infrastructure investment, direct subsidies, and the power to finance and build housing (Levine and Van Weesop 1988; Van Weesop and Wiegersma 1991). Amsterdam’s capacity to construct housing is a particularly potent policy instrument and constitutes a counter-vailing alternative to private development. Between 50% and 80% of housing in Amsterdam is subsidized or publicly built. This puts a considerable squeeze on private developers, who face limitations of and availability as well as zoning, density, and architectural controls. As a condition of development, it is not uncommon for commercial investors to agree to devote a portion of their projects toward residential use (Van Weesop and Wiegersma 1991).

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Indeed, the bargaining game in Holland is titled toward the public sector m ways that seem unimaginable in the United States. Freestyle commercial development in Amsterdam has been restricted, so that most neighborhoods remain residential. Because of massive housing subsidies, neighborhoods have lacked the extremes of wealth or poverty. Even squatting has been declared legal. Abandoned buildings have been taken over by groups of young, marginal, and working-class populations-thus leading to lower-class gentrification (Mamadouh 1990). All this compares very differently to the thrust of development outcomes in Detroit. The case of Poletown provides a stark profile of Detroit’s response to bargaining with the private sector (Fasenfest 1986). When General Motors announced that it was looking for a new plant site, the city invoked the state’s “quick take” law, allowing municipalities to acquire property before actually reaching agreement with individual owners. To attract the plant and an anticipated 6,000 jobs, the city moved more than 3,000 residents and 143 institutions (hospitals, churches, schools, and businesses) and demolished more than 1,000 buildings. To strike this bargain, Detroit committed to at least $200 million in direct expenditures and a. dozen years of tax abatements. In the end, the bargaining exchange resulted m one lost neighborhood and a gain of an automobile plant-all under what one judge labeled as the “guiding and sustaining, indeed controlling hand of the General Motors Corporation” Jones and Bachelor 1986). In many respects, Poletown reflects a larger pattern of bargaining. The city is now trying to expand its airport. At stake are 3,600 homes, more than 12,000 residents, and scores of businesses. The city and a local bank also have their sights set on a venerable auditorium called Ford Hall. The arrangement calls for razing Ford Hall and granting the developers an $18 million no-interest loan, payable in 28 years. When citizen protests stalled the project, developers threatened to move elsewhere. Since then, Detroit’s city council approved the project (Rich 1991). The polar cases of Amsterdam and Detroit reveal something about the vastly different development prizes and sacrifices that particular cities experience as a result of their accumulated bargaining advantages. Amsterdam is able to use public investment to extract concessions from investors and enforce development standards in a process conducted under public scrutiny. Detroit offers land, money, and tax relief to attract development in a process managed by a tight circle of political and economic elites.

Political Control of Urban Development By examining urban development from a state-bargaining perspective, we are able to identify some critical forces that influence local governmental

116  PART I    Governance and Political Economy control over this area of policy. From this vantage point, public influence over urban development appears to be tied to differences in market conditions, popular control mechanisms, and public policy systems because these interdependent spheres powerfully affect the ability of politicians to bargain with business. … By using our bargaining perspective, future researchers may be able to overcome the limitations of extant theory and better understand the actual political choices of local communities in economic development.

Note   1 Urban Summit Conference, New York City, 12 November 1990.

References Almond, G. 1988. The return to the state. American Political Science Review 82:853874. Bachrach, P., and M. Baratz. 1962. The two faces of power. American Political Science Review 56:947-952. Body-Gendrot, S. 1987. Grass roots mobilization in the Thirteenth Arrondissment: A cross national view. In The Politics of urban development edited by C. Stone and H. Sanders, 125-143. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. Capek, S., and J. Gilderbloom. 1992. Community versus commodity. Albany: State University of New York Press. Caro, R. 1974. The power broker. New York: Vintage. Christensen, T. 1979. Neighborhood survival. London: Prism Press. Crenson, M. 1971. The un-politics of air pollution. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Cummings, S., ed. 1988. Business elites and urban development. Albany: State University of New York Press. Dahl, R. 1971. Polyarchy. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Dahl, R., and C. E. Lindblom. 1965. Politics, economics, and welfare. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Danielson, M. 1976. The politics of exclusion. New York: Columbia University Press. Darden, J., R. C. Hill, J. Thomas, and R. Thomas. 1987. Race and uneven development. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Dreier, P. 1989. Economic growth and economic justice in Boston. In Unequal partnerships, edited by G. Squires, 35-S8. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Dreier, P., and W. D. Keating. 1990. The limits of localism: Progressive housing policies in Boston, 1984-1989. Urban Affairs Quarterly 26:191-216. Eisinger, P. 1987. Rise of the entrepreneurial state. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Elkin, D. 1987. State and market in city politics: Or, the real Dallas. In The politics of urban development, edited by C. Stone and H. Sanders, 25-51. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas.

CHAPTER 2   The Politics of Urban Economic Development in a New Era   117 Etzkowitz, H., and R. Mack. 1976. Emperialism in the First World: The corporation and the suburb. Paper presented at the Pacific Sociological Association meetings, San Jose, CA, March. Ewen, L. 1978. Corporate power and the urban crisis in Detroit. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Fainstein, S.S., N. I. Fainstein, R. C. Hill, D. Judd, and M. P. Smith. 1986. Restructuring the city. 2nd ed. New York: Longman. Fasenfest, D. 1986. Community politics and urban redevelopment. Urban Affairs Quarterly 22:101-123. Feagin, J. 1988. Free enterprise city. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Foglesong, R. 1989. Do politics matter in the formulation of local economic development policy: The case of Orlando, Florida. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Atlanta, GA, September. Governor turns down UAL. 1991. Courier-journal, 18 October, 1. Hill, R. C. 1986. Crisis in the motor city: The politics of urban development in Detroit. In Restructuring the city, 2d ed., by S.S. Fainstein, N. I. Fainstein, R. C. Hill, D. Judd, and M.P. Smith. New York: Longman. ______. Industrial restructuring, state intervention, and uneven development in the United States and Japan. Paper presented at conference: The tiger by the tail: Urban policy and economic restructuring in Comparative perspective. State University of New York, Albany, October. Jobse, B., and B. Needham. 1987. The economic future of the Randstad, Holland. Urban Studies 25: 282-296. Jones, B., and L. Bachelor. 1986. The sustaining hand. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. Kantor, P. 1993. The dual city as political choice. Journal of Urban Affairs 15 (3): 231-244. Kantor, P. (with S. David). 1988. The dependent city. Boston, MA: Scott, Foresman/ Little, Brown. Levine, M., and J. Van Weesop. 1988. The changing nature of urban planning in the Netherlands. Journal of the American Planning Association 54:315-323. Lindblom, C. 1977. Politics and markets. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. _____. 1982. The market as a prison. Journal of Politics 44:324-336. Logan, J., and H. Molotch. 1987. Urban fortunes. Berkeley: University of California Press. Logan, J., and T. Swanstrom, eds. 1990. Beyond the city limits. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Mamadouh, V. 1990. Squatting, housing, and urban polic y in Amsterdam. Paper presented at the International Research Conference on Housing Debates and Urban Challenges, Paris, July. Mollenkopf, J. 1983. The contested city. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Molotch, H., and S. Vicari. 1988. Three ways to build: The development process in the United States, Japan, and Italy. Urban Affairs Quarterly 24:186-214. Muzzio, D., and R. Bailey. 1986. Economic development, housing, and zoning. Journal of Urban Affairs 8:1-18. Nethercutt, M. 1987. Detroit twenty years after: A statistical profile of the Detroit area since 1967. Detroit, MI: Center for Urban Studies, Wayne State University. Noyelle, T., and T. M. Stanback. 1984. Economic transformation of American cities. New York Conservation for Human Resources Columbia University. Parkinson, M., B. Foley, and D. Judd. 1989. Regenerating the cities. Boston, MA: Scott, Foresman.

118  PART I    Governance and Political Economy Peterson, P. 1981. City limits. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rich, W. 1991. Detroit: From Motor City to service hub. In Big city politics in transition, edited by H. V. Savitch and J.C. Thomas, 64-85. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications. Rosentraub, M., and D. Swindell. 1990. “Just say no”? The economic and political realities of a small city’s investment in minor league baseball. Paper presented at the 20th annual meeting of the Urban Affairs Association, Charlotte, NC, April. Sassen, S. 1988. The mobility of capital and labor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Savitch, H. V. 1988. Post-industrial cities: Politics and planning in New York, Paris, and London. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Savitch, H. V., and J. C. Thomas, eds. 1991. Big city politics in transition. Newbury Park, CA Sage Publications. Stone, C. 1989. Regime politics. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. Stone, C., and H. Sanders, eds. 1987. The politics of urban development. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. Swanstrom, T. 1986. The crisis of growth politics. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. UAL bidding goes on. 1991. Courier-Journal. 22 October, 1. Van Weesop, J., and M. Wiegersma. 1991. Gentrification in the Netherlands. In Urban housing for the better-off: Gentrification in Europe edited by J. Van Weesop and S. Musterd, 98-111. Utrecht, Netherlands: Bureau Stedellijke Netwerken. Vaughn, R. 1979. State taxation and economic development. Washington, DC: Council of State Planning Agencies. Vogel, R. 1990. The local regime and economic development. Economic Development Quarterly 4:101-112. Walsh, A. 1978. The public’s business. Cambridge: MIT Press.

7 “Re-Stating” Theories of Urban Development James M. Smith‡ Among the most influential institutions in urban development, specialpurpose authorities and state governments have received the least attention from scholars of urban politics. Though they are often enablers of large development projects, both fiscally and managerially, their influence upon ‡ ‘“Re-Stating” Theories of Urban Development: The Politics of Authority Creation and Intergovernmental Triads in Postindustrial Chicago’, James M. Smith, Journal of Urban Affairs, 32.4, pp. 425–448, 2010, Taylor & Francis, reprinted by permission of the publisher (Taylor & Francis Ltd, http://www.tandfonline.com).

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the politics of urban development is rarely a focus of theories or case studies concerning cities in the United States. Extant theories of urban development have focused upon interaction between private-sector elites and local government officials. Group conflict, as well as conflict among individual political actors, has also received significant attention. Resolutions to such conflict, and thus, executable plans for urban development projects, are usually viewed through the lens of compromise among local actors and rarely turn an eye to the extra-local or institutional dynamics of urban development (DiGaetano, 1997). One could include in a list of these approaches many of the major theoretical frames for analyzing urban politics utilized over the past 50 years: elitism/structuralism (Hunter, 1953), pluralism (Dahl, 1961), the growth machine (Logan & Molotch, 1987), and most recently, regime theory (Stone, 1989). These theoretical frames are losing validity due to changes in development coalitions and partnerships, including the growing importance of specialpurpose authorities (Altshuler & Luberoff, 2003; Sbragia, 1996) and the critical role of state governments (Burns & Gamm, 1997; Eisinger, 1998; Pagano, 1990; Turner, 1990). The politics of large-scale urban development are increasingly taking place in state houses and the corridors of statecreated authorities with the necessary powers to bypass local protest and complications. In addition to placing the emphasis on local government officials and private-sector elites, theories must begin to consider the institutions political actors create to accomplish development goals and the venues in which political actors make final decisions pertaining to development. To better capture the character of contemporary development, this [selection] focuses on three governmental venues dictating decision making in Chicago: municipal government (specifically the mayor), state government (particularly the legislature and governor), and state-created special-purpose authorities. Actors from both the public and private sectors operate within these settings to promote an agenda of urban growth. Cases from the 1980s demonstrate that the forging of  formal  partnerships between these institutions, their officials, and private sector elites—not an informal partnership among business elites and local government officials as presented by growth machine and regime theories—has emerged as a key development strategy. I call this state–city arrangement an intergovernmental triad. In the case of Chicago, intergovernmental triads, once developed, completed and financed significant portions of the city’s recent infrastructure aimed at attracting visitors and tourists. Two of the three triads discussed in this article remain intact and play perennial roles in developing Chicago’s built environment. Rather than informal coalitions, then, growth interests create and utilize permanent bureaucracies pursuing missions of ­self-empowerment and

120  PART I    Governance and Political Economy development. As such arrangements multiply, concepts such as regimes lose explanatory value. In addition to asserting the importance of this institutional apparatus of urban development in Chicago, the article emphasizes the importance of inserting state governments into the discourse on urban politics generally. …

State Government in Urban Research Any urban politics textbook informs readers that state governments in the United States have long exercised significant structural, fiscal, and political power over cities. Discussions of 19th-century state debt restrictions and the legal consensus on Dillon’s Rule are common references to state governments’ constitutional supremacy over municipal governments. In this vein, Frug (1999) argues that states’ dominant legal position relative to their cities has often left municipalities powerless to confront critical issues. Nevertheless, state governments’ role in urban development has not been a central focus for most urban scholars (Burns & Gamm, 1997). Current trends in both public finance and state-city relations suggest that urban scholars should be looking more closely at state governments’ role as enablers of local development. Rather than constraining local power, states have cooperated with cities on economic development since the late 1970s (Nice & Fredericksen, 1995; Pagano, 1990). Specifically, local and state actors have formed “intergovernmental partnerships as a means of enhancing the ability of local governments to extract resources, particularly financial ones, from other governments” (Berman, 2003, p. 8). One principal explanation for the emergence of such partnerships has been the decline in federal urban funding, which has forced cities to seek out new fiscal partners and policy venues (Altshuler & Luberoff, 2003; Eisinger, 1998)…. Reflecting these shifts, certain scholars have redirected attention to interaction between state governments and cities. Sbragia’s (1996) account of state governments’ involvement in the politics of local finance presents a history of state–local relations in which constraints on local borrowing, and entrepreneurial reactions to them, explain patterns of public investment at the local level. With a similar focus on state-level institutions, Burns and Gamm (1997) study local lobbies’ involvement in state legislatures in three states during the late 19th and early 20th centuries and find that “the relationship between states and their creatures was intimate and utterly routine: The ordinary work of state politics was local affairs, and an ordinary branch of local government was the state legislature” (Burns & Gamm, 1997, p. 90).1 Studies of regionalism (Gainsborough, 2001; Weir, Wolman, & Swanstrom, 2005), metropolitan governance (Alpert, Gainsborough, & Wallis, 2006; Hamilton, Miller, & Paytas, 2004; Post & Stein, 2000; Sonenshein & Hogen-Esch, 2006; Weir, 1996), and growth management (Anthony, 2004),

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have explored the politics of state-city relations. Because regional reform necessitates changes to city charters, state governments should occupy a central space in all such studies. … Scholars of urban education have also focused on the role of state government in local decision making (Berman, 1995; Burns, 2003; DiLeo, 1998; Henig, Hula, Orr, & Pedescleaux 1999; Wong & Shen, 2002). Namely, states’ role has increased in areas of fiscal management, political accountability, criteria establishment for students with special needs, the allocation of federal grants, and the creation of academic standards (DiLeo, 1998, p. 117). In some instances, state governments have taken complete control over school districts to ensure both accountability and increased educational attainment (Burns, 2003; Wong & Shen, 2002). State governments have also played a central role in mayoral takeovers of urban school districts. These reforms, aimed at increasing accountability, have involved mayoral involvement at the state level in Baltimore (Orr, 2004), Chicago (Shipps, 2004), and Detroit (Mirel, 2004). In the case of Chicago, the Illinois legislature devolved numerous state-level educational powers to Mayor Richard M. Daley (Shipps, 2004, p. 77). Though existing theories of downtown development do not often include consideration of state government, Burns and Thomas (2004) take a significant step toward incorporating state-city coalitions in such studies. They identify a governor-based coalition in New Orleans operating during the late 1990s and early 2000s. Rather than emphasize the role of the state government in local affairs, however, they argue that urban regime theory should be retooled in order to consider nonlocal actors such as governors or national-level politicians. Elsewhere, Burns (2002, 2003) has argued that state government has the “capacity” to act as a member in the local regime— especially in the case of education policy—while noting that “regime theory does not include governors, state legislatures, state departments of education, and other state-level actors as education regime members” (Burns, 2003, p. 285).2 Burns argues that regime theory must be expanded to account for such actors. The cases from Chicago examined below also reflect a governor-brokered coalition, but suggest that the arguments of Burns (2002, 2003) and Burns and Thomas (2004) need to be taken one step further by leaving the regime framework behind and focusing on a more broadly based, and formal, intergovernmental partnership. In Chicago, these partnerships center on a special-purpose authority and bring together progrowth actors from the state and local levels, and the private sector, with the aim of completing large development projects. In line with the argument that regime theory is not broad enough in its scope (e.g., Burns & Thomas, 2004; DiGaetano, 1997), the Chicago cases reveal that institutional actors must be considered in greater detail—not as members of a regime, but as formal replacements for informal arrangements.

122  PART I    Governance and Political Economy

The Intergovernmental Triad and Urban Development in Chicago In most studies of Chicago’s politics of growth, the central figure has been the mayor, and for a long period in the 20th century, the Democratic Party machine.3 Research presented below emphasizes institution-building and local actors’ interaction with the state government where other studies have focused primarily on political interactions at the local level. The era of interest is the time between Richard J. Daley’s death in 1976 and the election of his son, Richard M. Daley, in 1989. This period is generally viewed as an era during which Chicago’s development politics were adrift. The strong political machine that had guided the city for over 40 years was in disarray, while the City Council was marked by extreme conflict (Grimshaw, 1992; Simpson, 2001). Research presented below offers a different interpretation of the era, one in which the 1980s was a pivotal time for the construction of a governmental infrastructure that continues to play a critical role in producing a postindustrial Chicago able to generate revenue by attracting tourists and middle-class residents back into the city. Though “council wars” have been emphasized in research on this era, the mayors of Chicago between 1980 and 1990 lobbied for large development projects and needed state-level actors’ cooperation, especially fiscally, to make such plans a reality. Bennett and Spirou (2006) discuss this pivotal time in the context of mayoral politics. Their studies of stadium development and neighborhood politics in Chicago (see also Spirou & Bennett, 2003) find that the politics of a reborn downtown, filled with stadiums and other cultural amenities, emerged not during the mayoralty of Richard M. Daley (1989-present), but with one of his predecessors, Harold Washington (1983–1987). Bennett and Spirou (2006) designate this as a “paradox” due to Washington’s reputation as a progressive mayor. Like the sporting infrastructure, plans for the projects discussed below originated under mayors other than Richard M. Daley. Washington held office during the creation of the 1992 World’s Fair Authority (WFA) and the Illinois Sports Facilities Authority (ISFA), and he commissioned a Navy Pier Authority before dying in office in 1987.4 Though he is remembered primarily for his progressive development policies, Washington was critical in laying the foundation for two intergovernmental triads that would pursue large, capital-intensive development projects—projects not out of the ordinary for big-city mayors of this era. Although Washington played a primary role in constructing the intergovernmental triads discussed below, Illinois governor, Republican James R. Thompson (1977–1991), was the lead figure in their formation. Thompson viewed the creation of authorities as an economic development strategy in itself. After the formation of the ISFA in 1986, Thompson told the  Chicago

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Tribune: “I think it’s a model of state–city cooperation to achieve a very worthwhile project and I hope it will serve as a model for any further efforts that may be required for the Bears or the Cubs or Disney or Navy Pier or the development of the lakefront or for similar projects in the collar counties, the suburbs and Downstate” (Egler & McCarron, 1986b).5 A defining character of special-purpose authorities similar to those Thompson promoted is the way in which they act as mechanisms for concentrating decision-making power by bringing together public and private actors at the state or multistate level. Special-purpose authorities are often praised for their increased fiscal capacity and efficient managerial skills (Doig, 1983) and have been a prominent tool for officials looking to bypass local resistance to development plans (Altshuler & Luberoff, 2003; Sanders, 1992) or restrictions on local borrowing (Sbragia, 1996). Authorities’ unelected boards, and often cloaked decision-making processes, have reduced the capacity of voters and residents to influence decision making while increasing private sector influence on the allocation of resources (Burns, 1994; Doig & Mitchell, 1992). Authorities are used for various purposes, and take many forms throughout Illinois and within Chicago;6 their role in financing and managing large development projects in 1980s Chicago is the focus here. As opposed to large development projects in which no special-purpose authority is created, the cases below involve institutions where private, state, local, and regional interests have been fused into one political body. Private-sector actors enter the intergovernmental triad directly when members of the local elite are appointed to board positions on authorities.7 The intergovernmental triad, then, is an institutional arrangement by which the various interests of urban development come together with the institutional capacity, autonomy, and fiscal powers to carry out large development projects (Figure 1). The three nodes of the triad are constituted by the city government (the jurisdiction in which the development is taking place and the interests of which will be represented via board appointments to the authority), the state government (which creates the special-purpose authority, and in most cases finances significant portions of development projects through new and existing revenue streams; the primary source of an authority’s fiscal power, however, usually comes from its ability to issue revenue bonds), and the special-purpose authority (depending upon the state, this institution will be known by different names and hold varying amounts of statutory powers—for example, in some cases the authority may have the power to tax—but is characterized by an appointed board made up of privatesector representatives put in place by the other governments involved in the triad. The authority’s primary role is implementation and management of urban development). The special-purpose authority, in most cases a product of informal bargaining between state and city actors before its creation,

124  PART I    Governance and Political Economy maintains formal relations with the state and city governments through the appointment powers of governor and mayor. Relations between state and local actors may begin informally and in some cases remain that way, as represented by the dashed line between the two in Figure 1; however, the institutional offspring of this bargaining process emerges as its own political entity and pursues its own institutional interests over time. This intergovernmental arrangement is not unique to Chicago—examples are numerous and are often mentioned briefly in scholarly work on urban development. For example, the Burns and Thomas (2004) piece cited above describes the offloading of gaming policy in New Orleans to “a nine-member quasi-governmental casino corporation” (Burns & Thomas, 2004, p. 798). In Seattle, stadium development shifted to the state level when supporters of a stadium for the Seattle Mariners baseball team failed to win a local referendum—the legislation for the Seattle Seahawks football team was also approved at the state level (Sapotichne, 2007), resulting in the creation of the Washington State Public Stadium Authority, which currently manages the football stadium and an attached event center (WSPSA, 2004). In Denver, the Colorado state government played a critical role in funding a stadium project for the Colorado Rockies MLB baseball team and held appointment powers on the stadium district board (Clarke & Saiz, 2003). This pattern of state involvement and authority creation is common in the politics of convention center expansion and construction (Sanders, 1992), and other large development projects such as sports stadiums (Altshuler & Luberoff, 2003, p. 34).

Specialpurpose Authority

City

FIGURE 1  Intergovernmental Triad

State

CHAPTER 2   The Politics of Urban Economic Development in a New Era   125

Whether or not such patterns directly match the triad found in Chicago, the cases below represent a wider trend in the politics of urban development. The state–city partnership is a prominent model for ambitious urban development in contemporary U.S. cities. Without state government aid and states’ willingness to create special-purpose authorities, much of the money used to rebuild America’s downtowns would have been unavailable to political actors.

Case Studies: 1992 World’s Fair, White Sox’s New Stadium, and Navy Pier I now turn to three cases in which the intergovernmental triad operates to varying degrees of effectiveness: Chicago’s failed attempt to host the 1992 World’s Fair, the construction of a new stadium for the Chicago White Sox, and the redevelopment of Navy Pier into an entertainment district. The state– city coalitions, or intergovernmental triads, Governor Thompson formed in collaboration with Chicago mayors consisted of three institutional actors and four stages. The members of the triad included the Chicago city government (particularly the mayor of Chicago), the state of Illinois (namely the governor and legislative leaders), and the authority created to manage the projects (including the private-sector representatives serving on authority boards). The stages of the projects studied here were: (1) project conception, (2) local/ state debate, (3) authority creation, and (4) implementation/project failure.8 In all cases, key decisions occur at the last possible moment and take place in the Illinois General Assembly, not City Hall.9 Authority creation follows a similar pattern in the three cases as the state government and Chicago reach power-sharing agreements splitting appointment powers between the mayor and governor (see Tables 1 and 2). In two of the three cases, authority creation occurs at the debate’s culmination and is accompanied by the necessary funding.10 Additional planning is left to the authority created to manage the project. The process leading up to the creation of the authorities, and the institutional character of the authorities themselves, is closed off from the public and final decisions are not put to the electorate for a vote. Fiscally speaking, authority creation is the enabler of the two projects that reached completion and the primary reason that the World’s Fair project survived as long as it did.11 In all three cases, the necessary funds were viewed as impractical during the debate stages, and yet, when the state enters discussions, projects gain credibility. The two completed projects, Navy Pier and the new Comiskey Park/U.S. Cellular Field, have been a boon to the local economy—particularly Navy Pier (see Table 3). The Metropolitan Pier and Exposition Authority, which manages Navy Pier, contributed around $169 million in tax revenue in

126  PART I    Governance and Political Economy TABLE 1  Newspaper Accounts of Institution Creation Authority

Chicago Tribune’s Description

1992 World’s Fair Authority

“A 25-member board to oversee the World’s Fair in Chicago in 1992 was approved late Friday night by the Illinois General Assembly. …The measure, if certified by the governor, would create a 25-member commission—with 12 members appointed by the governor and 12 appointed by the mayor of Chicago. The chairman would be selected jointly by the two leaders” (Chicago Tribune, November 4, 1983).

Illinois Sports Facilities Authority

“The 50,000-seat, open-air baseball stadium would be built by a city-state authority with a seven-member governing board. Three members each would be appointed by the governor and the mayor, with a chairman appointed by both. The authority would be empowered to sell up to $120 million in tax-exempt municipal bonds, or enough to cover acquisition of land from the Sox, site improvements, interest and other costs, plus construction of a $60 million ballpark” (Chicago Tribune, December 3, 1986).

Metropolitan Pier and Exposition Authority

“Under provisions of the legislation, the new Pier and Exposition Authority will replace the Metropolitan Fair and Exposition Authority, which had run McCormick Place, and will expand its authority to include the renovation of Navy Pier, said Avis LaVelle, Daley`s press secretary. Daley will appoint six of the members of the new panel as well as the chairman. Gov. James Thompson will name the other six members and the executive director of the new authority. The executive director would be a staff officer and not a member of the board” (Chicago Tribune, July 3, 1989).

Source: Chicago Tribune, 1983; Egler & McCarron, 1986a; Recktenwald, 1989.

2006 and reports generating more than $1 billion dollars of total economic activity while attracting 8.5 million visitors per year at Navy Pier alone (MPEA, 2006, 2007). During fiscal year 2006, the ISFA collected $375,936 in ticket revenue at U.S. Cellular Field and $73,000 in special events revenue while posting a regular-season attendance of just under 3 million (Chicago White Sox, 2007; ISFA, 2006). Both sites contribute to the city’s tourism infrastructure, which generated $10.9 billion in spending and $616 million in tax revenue during 2006 (Chicago Convention and Tourism Bureau, 2008).

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TABLE 2  Authority Structure and Project Cost Project

Authority

Number of Board Members

Projected Cost

Project completed?

1992 World’s Fair

1992 World’s Fair Authority

24

$1 billion

No

New Sox Park

Illinois Sports Facilities Authority

7

$150 million

Yes

Navy Pier

Metropolitan Pier and Exposition Authority

13

$150 million

Yes

Source: MPEA, ISFA, Chicago Tribune. Note: Appointment powers shared by Illinois governor and Chicago mayor in all three cases. For WFA, the mayor and governor split appointments evenly with a jointly appointed chair; each official appoints three members to the ISFA board with mayoral approval of a governorappointed chair; the MPEA board represents six mayoral and gubernatorial appointments with the mayor of Chicago appointing the chairman and the governor appointing the MPEA’s chief executive officer.

TABLE 3 Visitors and Spending in Chicago, 2006 Venue

Visitors

Total Spending

Tax Revenue

U.S. Cellular Field

2,957,414*

NA†

$448,936‡

Navy Pier

8,800,000

$1,200,000,000

$169,000,000§

McCormick Place

2,241,324

$3,400,000,000

$169,000,000

Chicago total

44,170,000

$10,900,000,000

$616,700,000

Source: Chicago Convention and Tourism Bureau (www.choosechicago.com), MPEA Annual Report 2006, MPEA Press Release (2007), ISFA Annual Report (2006), http://chicago.whitesox. mlb.com *  Regular season attendance † The ISFA does not provide figures relating to total spending in its 2006 annual report. Other research on the venue suggests that spending at U.S. Cellular takes place almost exclusively in the stadium and surrounding parking lots, rather than having a broader economic impact on the city and neighborhood (Spirou & Bennett, 2003; Baade et al. 2006). The newer facility, however, generates more than one-third more in non-ticket revenue than its intra-city companion, Wrigley Field (Baade et al. 2006). ‡  Revenue collected by ISFA on ticket sales and special event sales § Together with McCormick Place and other MPEA venues

128  PART I    Governance and Political Economy Though Chicago did not win the right to host the 1992 World’s Fair, the city’s attempt to host the 2016 Olympics demonstrates that local boosters did not lose faith in such large events’ ability to attract attention to the city. …

World’s Fair 1992 While hosting the Columbian Exposition World’s Fair in 1893, Chicago was toured by hordes of visitors from the United States and across the globe (Cronon, 1991). Civic elites in the early 1980s longed for similar attention, and as they searched for ways to rejuvenate the central area, a World’s Fair cropped up as one method of doing so. As one journalist mused, the city was looking for 19th century solutions to its 21st century problems (Longworth, 1985). In this case, the intergovernmental triad approach was adopted after a few years of private-sector lobbying for the Fair. Chicago’s business elite formed a tightly knit nonprofit organization, the 1992 Corporation, to advocate the Fair (Shlay & Giloth, 1987). However, rather than work from outside government, some members of the 1992 Corporation would be incorporated into the government (or public-sector) as members on a board of directors for the 1992 WFA (see Appendix A). The authority worked closely with the governor of Illinois and the mayor of Chicago, but would ultimately fail due to a lack of fiscal support from the state legislature. The potential for political rewards associated with a World’s Fairmagnitude project would appeal to any mayor (Shlay & Giloth, 1987)— Jane Byrne was no exception. In 1981, she announced that Chicago would officially pursue the 1992 World’s Fair (Mier, 1995). The primary local opposition to the Fair arose out of the city’s neighborhoods. A group of neighborhood interests calling themselves the Chicago 1992 Committee led the charge against the Fair, producing reports predicting its negative effects and distributing their findings to local political actors (McClory, 1993). On the other side of the debate were the Chicago mayors who held office during the campaign for the Fair—Byrne (1979–1983) and Harold Washington (1983–1987)—and the Governor of Illinois, James R. Thompson.  Washington’s support was not as forthright as Byrne’s or Thompson’s; while  Washington supported the idea of a Fair in Chicago, he considered it part of his mandate to approach development situations differently than his progrowth predecessors (Mier, 1995). Thompson played a significant role in promoting the Fair. He pushed legislation through the Illinois General Assembly in 1983 that created the 1992 WFA (Chicago Tribune, 1983; Mier, 1995), thus serving as the instigator of the intergovernmental partnership to follow. Many of the local actors leading the push for the Fair took lead roles in the new state-mandated authority.

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Most significantly, Thomas Ayers, the retired chairman of Chicagoland’s energy company, Commonwealth Edison, was named as the WFA’s chairman (Chicago Tribune, 1983). Ayers was involved in various endeavors tied to downtown redevelopment around this time, including a massive residential redevelopment to the south of the central business district (Wille, 1997). Political conflict and a cloaked decision-making atmosphere marked the WFA’s tenure. The authority closed its doors to the public during meetings and produced reports painting a rosy picture for the Fair’s financial impact (Mier, 1995). Political conflicts between the city government and the WFA also arose. Much of this was focused on the assumption that Washington would attempt to slow the WFA’s progress. In other cases, conflict involved the tendency of the WFA to negotiate without the consent of the city. For instance, the Authority was at one point in negotiations with the Chicago Park District requesting that the Park District manage Navy Pier and two Lake Michigan harbors during the Fair; however, both of these areas were under city jurisdiction. Washington and his administration were not brought into the discussion immediately, which reportedly angered the mayor (McCarron, 1985). An additional aspect of the lobbying process was convincing state legislators that the Fair was worthy of state funding. Thompson attempted to gain the support of state representatives (Mier, 1995), but legislators were wary of the Fair’s nearly $1 billion price tag (Neal, 1985). In addition to the political rifts between the intergovernmental partners and resistance by neighborhood groups, the finding of a particular feasibility study doomed the Fair’s future: even after reducing its projected cost by nearly $200 million, the Fair would lose $50–$350 million (McCarron & Egler, 1985). State legislators were convinced that the money requested was not worth the risk. Just as the WFA was created at the state level and with the support of the governor, it was a state official, House Speaker Michael Madigan, a Democrat from Chicago, who lobbied against the Fair after learning of the projected financial loss. Shortly after Madigan came out against the Fair, Governor Thompson declared Chicago’s campaign to host the event dead (McCarron & Egler, 1985). Shlay and Giloth (1987) attribute the Fair’s failure in part to Washington’s mixed emotions on the project; McClory (1993) credits a strong coalition of neighborhood interests with weakening the business elite’s push for the Fair. The argument presented here places the Fair’s downfall more squarely with the inability of the intergovernmental triad and its individual actors to secure state-level funding for the project. In other words, the answer as to why the Fair failed is not entirely a local question. The application of a growth machine or regime framework cannot fully explain this turn of events. Perhaps Washington’s support of the Fair was not genuine, but he let the state legislature call his bluff. Despite the insulation from politics that an authority is supposed to provide leaders, the WFA was unable to sway

130  PART I    Governance and Political Economy state officials responsible for authorizing the project’s funding that it was a responsible investment. This suggests that in certain cases, securing state-level approval may be the most critical aspect of central city development, and certainly one worthy of urban scholars’ consideration.

A New Stadium for the White Sox In the case of building a new stadium for the Chicago White Sox, a great deal of conflict arose over political appointments and power within the intergovernmental triad. The stadium’s eventual construction was secured by both the fiscal capacity of the ISFA and Governor Thompson’s strong lobbying effort in a late-night legislative session in June 1988. The White Sox’s interaction with state and local government can be broken down into four segments: the proposed city-financed, multiteam domed stadium on the near South Side; the Addison, Illinois, option;12 renewed talks with Chicago and flirtations with St. Petersburg, Florida; and finally, the plan’s fruition—a baseball-only stadium sited directly across the street from the team’s former home, Comiskey Park. The stadium is currently named U.S. Cellular Field. By the mid 1980s, White Sox management was earnestly complaining about the outdated structure in which the team played. Comiskey Park, was, at the time, the oldest baseball stadium in Major League Baseball and could not compete with newer structures around the country in terms of revenue and stadium amenities such as luxury boxes (Spirou & Bennett, 2003). This put the franchise in a good position to bargain with the City of Chicago for a new—publicly funded—stadium. The team threatened to relocate if its demands were not met. What complicated the matter in Chicago was the fact that the White Sox were not the only team stadium shopping—the Chicago Bears franchise was in negotiations with its landlord, the Chicago Park District, concerning renovation of Soldier Field, the team’s home field, or the building of a new stadium. The solution proposed by the City of Chicago was to build a domed stadium to be used by both teams. Harold Washington and his economic development team suggested that the stadium be located on the near South Side of the city along the Chicago River at Roosevelt Road. The proposed stadium would cost $255 million and require rent payments from both teams. The Sox tentatively agreed to this stadium deal in mid 1986 (McCarron, 1986), but the Bears discontinued talks with the city (Spirou & Bennett, 2003, p. 74). Just after the failure of the near South proposal, both Mayor Washington and Governor Thompson began discussing the potential creation of a specialpurpose authority to finance new stadiums for the respective teams. The first reports of Illinois creating a special-purpose authority to finance and manage a new stadium for the White Sox appeared in June of 1986. The Washington administration drafted legislation to be considered in the Illinois

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General Assembly that would create an authority with the ability to tax and borrow funds to build a $220 million stadium (Egler, 1986a). The fact that the legislation was generated by the Washington administration demonstrates that city officials viewed authority creation as a development tool rather than a power grab by state officials. Governor Thompson proposed an authority plan shortly after Washington. In his version, rather than appointments to a seven-member board being split between the mayor and governor (as Washington suggested), the governor controlled five spots on a nine-member board with three remaining for mayoral appointment and one for White Sox appointment (Egler, 1986b). Thompson and Washington reached an agreement on a seven-member board for the stadium authority in June of 1986 but the Illinois General Assembly voted against funding the proposal (Chicago Tribune, 1986).13 Six months later, the Illinois legislature passed a bill creating the ISFA and enabled it to issue $120 million in revenue bonds to pay for a 45,000seat stadium on 35th Street, just across the street from the old stadium. The bonds would be financed using an increase in the Chicago hotel/motel tax, which would reach 12.1% (Egler & McCarron, 1986c). Even after the state created the ISFA, political conflict threatened the fate of the new stadium. Just before his death, Washington refused to approve Thompson’s nominee for the ISFA chairman position, Thomas Reynolds, Jr., in an attempt to gain concessions from Thompson on a range of issues including a change in the majority needed in ISFA votes (from four to five), an increase in affirmative action minimums (from the state requirement of 10% of contracts to the city’s minimum of 25%), and gubernatorial approval of mayoral appointments to the authority that managed the city’s convention center at the time (Dold, 1987). The spat between Thompson and Washington concerned Sox management, which entered into talks with the state of Florida regarding the possibility of playing baseball in St. Petersburg in an already under construction domed stadium (Spirou & Bennett, 2003, p. 68). It was not until June 1988, and after another round of late-night votes in the Illinois General Assembly, that the Sox firmly committed to stay in Chicago. Earlier in the same year, the Sox had state officials in Florida and Illinois working very hard to put together attractive financial packages for the team. The Sox demanded that Illinois come up with a sum greater than the $120 million it had approved at the end of 1986. Legislators in both states passed bills promising either the construction of a new stadium or improvements to existing facilities. It was thought by most that the Sox would move to Florida and that the Illinois legislature would not authorize spending. But a last-minute lobbying effort by Thompson ended in a deal for the Sox better than their first. The new package, still utilizing the ISFA and the triad model, provided $150 million and satisfied White Sox owners Jerry Reinsdorf and Eddie Einhorn (McCarron & Egler, 1988; Pelissero et al.,

132  PART I    Governance and Political Economy 1991; Spirou & Bennett, 2003). The ISFA completed the stadium on time, but, like the WFA, managed community relations in a way that prompted criticism from displaced residents of the Chicago neighborhood in which the stadium was being built (Spirou & Bennett, 2003). Previous research on this case focuses on the local conflicts among neighbors of the stadiums, the team, and the city of Chicago (Spirou & Bennett, 2003), and the approach of the “Chicago regime” to stadium development (Pelissero et al., 1991). The analysis offered here points to a different set of relationships between state and local officials that enabled the project to go forward—and at times threatened its success. As in the World’s Fair case, any regime or growth machine analysis would have omitted key decision-making elements of the process, which occurred in a venue other than local government. From June 1986 on, the politics of stadium development were primarily state level.

Navy Pier It is in the third case that the intergovernmental triad model occurs most fluently. The creation of the Metropolitan Pier and Exposition Authority (MPEA) in 1989 built on the lessons learned from the ISFA in that appointments among the governor and mayor were split evenly. Also, each official would be responsible for appointing an executive of the new authority—the mayor would name the chairman of the board of directors and the governor would appoint the agency’s chief executive officer. The MPEA’s creation was perhaps the most conflict-free of the three cases as a result of its timing—it was created, and thus brought in to manage the redevelopment, after most of the conflict had already played out regarding what should be done with Navy Pier. Perhaps the most crucial aspect of the MPEA’s success was the $150 million in state funds targeted for Navy Pier redevelopment that accompanied its creation. Navy Pier, a part of the Chicago Plan of 1909 (Smith, 2006), was built in 1916 as a multipurpose development that would house industry and serve as a place of leisure for city residents. Today, Navy Pier is Illinois’ leading tourist attraction with nearly 9 million visitors per year (MPEA, 2006). The structure itself runs nearly three-fifths of a mile into Lake Michigan and sits to the north of the Chicago River’s mouth. The Pier was built to operate as a mixed-use facility for recreation and industry and has since served as a U.S. Naval training base, a campus for the University of Illinois, and as a site for sporadic Chicago events during the 1970s and 1980s—it did not have a primary use from 1965 to1995 (MPEA, 2008). During these decades many residents and politicians in Chicago saw it as a wasted resource. While other cities around the nation were capitalizing on the revitalization of old industrial structures into profit-making entertainment districts, Chicago was sitting on its hands (and resources).

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Three mayors tackled the idea of redeveloping the Pier between 1979 and 1989—all three failed. Jane Byrne proposed a commercial development shaped by James Rouse (Ziemba, 1982) that failed due to a lack of public support for the partial privatization of the Pier. Counter to Byrne’s attempted revitalization, Harold Washington’s administration envisioned the Pier as an urban park. A report published by the Washington administration, “Window on the Future,” set the rhetorical tone for Navy Pier as Chicago’s central public space (City of Chicago, 1985). The plan ultimately failed to convince the City Council that it could produce financial benefits for the city. Eugene Sawyer (mayor from 1987 to 1989), created the Navy Pier Development Authority (NPDA), the first step toward utilization of the intergovernmental triad approach (which he was concurrently invested in concerning the new stadium for the White Sox). The primary task of the NPDA was to craft a formal plan for Navy Pier’s redevelopment. The NPDA hired the Urban Land Institute to make recommendations on the Pier’s redevelopment, taking a significant step toward renewing Navy Pier.14 There is no way to know with complete certainty, but, based on the fast action of Sawyer’s NPDA once it was created, one can assume that it might have been successful had it not run out of time before Richard M. Daley won the 1989 election. Frustration over this string of mayors’ inability to redevelop Navy Pier combined with Thompson’s continuing support of large capital projects in Chicago created a policy window for Daley. At this point in the political debates surrounding Navy Pier’s future a near-consensus existed among Chicago’s political elite that the priority for Navy Pier was to do anything rather than let the structure rot in Lake Michigan for another 20 years.15 Daley collaborated with Thompson to direct state funds to Chicago and Navy Pier that would provide the funding needed to reshape Navy Pier.16 The culmination of the Daley–Thompson agreement came when the Illinois General Assembly created the MPEA in June of 1989 (McCarron, 1989; Recktenwald, 1989). With the creation of the MPEA the state authorized the issuance of $150 million in bonds for the redevelopment of the Pier. In addition to providing state funds for Chicago’s redevelopment project, the legislation called for the MPEA to manage McCormick Place, the city’s convention center (MPEA, 2002; Recktenwald, 1989).17 The Chicago Tribune called the legislative bill a “plum” for Mayor Daley as it gave the city everything it needed to rebuild Navy Pier (Recktenwald, 1989). It also placed many of the important decisions regarding development in the hands of an appointed private elite; the MPEA board of directors was, and is, composed entirely of private-sector representatives. This private representation constitutes one arm of the intergovernmental triad and institutionalizes the private influence and leadership noted as an informal aspect of urban regimes.

134  PART I    Governance and Political Economy At Navy Pier, the MPEA acted efficiently, opening the attraction in 1995 as promised. The development ran the typical course of a public authority-managed project: there was limited interaction with the public (Chicago Sun-Times, 1992) and the final product resembled private developments in other cities, which officials in Chicago had been trying to avoid. For example, Benjamin Thompson and Associates, the architectural firm that designed similar tourist areas in Boston and Baltimore (BTA, 1990), led the renovation. The City Council may have turned down the Rouse proposals in the early 1980s, but MPEA decisions ensured a heavy private influence. Navy Pier’s redevelopment caused great stress to a succession of Chicago mayors who worked to change the landmark but could not find the right recipe of public and private action. The city’s current mayor, Richard M. Daley, might gladly claim credit for reshaping Navy Pier; without the state aid, however, and particularly without the creation of the MPEA, plans for Navy Pier might have remained idle for some time following his inauguration. The MPEA, and specifically officials’ reliance on it for other development projects, has significantly altered the ecology of governance in Chicago. Its presence as a seemingly permanent institution implies that the intergovernmental triad approach, and particularly a system of cooperation between Chicago and Illinois, can become a dominant feature of local politics.

Discussion The cases presented here reflect a process of urban development in which three elements differ dramatically from previous studies, and specifically the regime approach. Each element reflects the ways in which shifting focus toward institutional actors, and particularly state governments, may help to uncover ways in which current theories of urban development do not accurately characterize contemporary processes. First, and most clearly, the state government, and particularly the state legislative assembly, is the primary decision-making venue for project authorization and the governor a key advocate of the development projects. Second, the resulting governing arrangements include a formal arrangement by which actors from state and local government, and the private sector, manage urban redevelopment. Third, political actors’ utilization of special-purpose authorities shapes not only the cases discussed but also the character of growth politics in the city generally. The implications for each of these observations are discussed below. State government involvement in the three cases is characterized by both gubernatorial lobbying for Chicago development projects and legislative approval for the creation of special-purpose authorities to manage development. In previous efforts to explain state interaction in downtown

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development (Burns, 2002; Burns & Thomas, 2004), the governor has been characterized as a member of a governing regime. In the Chicago case, the Illinois governor does not fit this characterization. Thompson’s level of support for these projects has not been consistent among his successors. His immediate successor, Republican Jim Edgar, did not work as effectively with Mayor Richard M. Daley (see Strahler, 1996; Washburn, 2005),18 though Republican George Ryan and Daley did agree on many development issues (Spielman, 2002). Thus, Thompson’s role in these cases does not match the long-term, stable coalition membership typical of regimes; the cases here suggest that expanding regime theory to include such state-level entry into local development coalitions would reflect what Mossberger and Stoker (2001) identify as parochialism within the regime literature. In the case that regime theory does not explain governor, or state, involvement in lobbying for local development, other explanations should be explored. The triad approach offered here suggests that creating the permanent development authorities such as ISFA and MPEA may benefit governors and states in two ways. First, special-purpose authorities create distance between elected officials and controversial policy decisions (Foster, 1997, p. 20); once an authority is managing a development, governors may choose to limit their direct interaction with local policy issues. Thus, governors may appease big-city city mayors, constituents, or campaign financiers by helping to fill a funding gap for ambitious urban development projects, but take fewer political risks in doing so. Second, governors may utilize authorities to pursue policies they view as beneficial to the state as a whole, their political party, or their own political interests. In the cases considered above, Thompson’s interest in Chicago development can be explained by the fact that governors have a shared interest in their cities’ economic health (Eisinger, 1998, p. 104), and particularly in the state’s economic capital. Chicago’s role as the dominant fiscal engine for the state has certainly played to its favor in state–city relations historically and in these specific cases. And while accounts of Chicago’s mayors’ ability to significantly influence decision making in the state capitol have at times been overstated (Gove & Preston, 1985), Chicago’s influence in state politics should be considered as a feature of this case study that may not apply in other cities. The intergovernmental triad approach, then, explains the sporadic entry of governors and other state actors onto the scene of urban politics for the purposes of securing cities’ economic health or solving large political disputes. This activity does not constitute membership in a regime, which as Stone (1989) instructs, is an informal cooperative arrangement that stays steady over long periods of time. While the state’s political influence remains steady because of authorities’ formal nature and, in this case, the governor’s appointment powers, sustained interest in a broad range of development projects is unlikely.

136  PART I    Governance and Political Economy Formalization of governing coalitions is a second difference in the cases studied here. Rather than “informal arrangements by which public bodies and private interests function together” (Stone, 1989, p. 6), the governing boards of authorities represent a formal joining of public and private for the purposes of decision making.19 In all three cases, members of Chicago’s private sector are invited to take seats on the authority boards. In appointing the WFA board, Governor Thompson and Mayor Washington directly incorporated individuals who had been involved in the private sector’s push for the 1992 World’s Fair (see Appendix A). Also of note is the fact that publishers of the city’s two leading newspapers—classic examples of members of a “growth machine” (Logan & Molotch, 1987)—were named to the board. While the private supporters of the White Sox stadium and the Navy Pier redevelopment were not as explicit, mayoral and gubernatorial appointments to the initial boards of directors at the respective authorities reflect a selection of industry representatives that can be viewed as having progrowth interests or acting as members of a regime. Namely, representatives come from fields such as real estate development, construction, labor, and the legal profession (see Appendix A). Through this formalization process, authorities and the intergovernmental triad serve as anchors for governance. This formal mechanism for development raises questions regarding the power-sharing arrangements once the authority is functioning. Is one leg of the triad stronger than another? What are the incentives for each institutional actor in this formal partnership? Does the triad also create drawbacks for states, cities, and authorities? Because of its statutory power over local governments (including the power to create the authorities), the state appears to be the strongest leg in the triad and through the creation of the authority secures an authoritative voice in local development politics. However, in offering fiscal support to Chicago interests, state politicians may be making themselves vulnerable to critics; this may be especially true of governors such as Thompson, who champion big-city interests and may be pressed to find a balance with state-level officials representing constituencies outside of the city in question. Also, though states’ fiscal resources are greater than cities they are assisting, they are still finite and becoming overcommitted to urban development may harm states’ fiscal health. City government appears to gain in that development projects are being carried out without taking up valuable lines on the city budget—in most cases city officials are increasing capacity without giving up fiscal resources. But Chicago, too, finds itself in a position of vulnerability in that it has given up jurisdiction on areas managed by special-purpose authorities. In terms of its actual input into the triad, the city government appears to be the weakest leg in the arrangement—the city is more concerned with the outcome produced by the two more powerfully vested institutions, the state and special-purpose authority. The special-purpose authorities gain their power through the

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implementation of the development and the powers they are given to plan future developments; authorities’ existence, and thus the existence of triads, is dependent upon their ability to lobby for project authorization and to manage developments efficiently—this makes them both a strong and critical leg in the triad arrangement. Private sector representatives gain a seat at the governing table and do not appear to be giving up any of the influence that they might have had under informal arrangements. By being formally incorporated, private-sector actors may have more power to influence the allocation of resources to networks close to their interests (e.g., voting on the approval of contracts). All actors in the triad, then, have shared interests in the creation and maintenance of this formal mechanism for growth. State governments’ increased role in development and the formalization of the growth coalition are both facilitated by officials’ use of special-purpose authorities, the third difference considered here. The intergovernmental triad approach makes authorities a centerpiece for analyses of urban development, rather than a side note, as has been the tendency of many studies focusing on governance and center city development. Authorities are critical to the triad model as they are the institutional mechanism bringing states into the development process and formalizing the private sector’s role in decision making. In other words, it is as a result of this institution that the triad, and the resulting formal relationships, exists. Without it, private actors remain as informal actors and the state does not hold a sustained jurisdictional interest. In addition to acting as the institutional cement for the state–city–private sector relationship, the utilization of special-purpose authorities has two principal effects on the processes of development discussed in the cases above. First, it has further removed decision making from public access points such as referenda (Altshuler & Luberoff, 2003; Sanders, 1992). State and local governments use special-purpose authorities as mechanisms for expediting both the approval of development projects and the decision-making process to follow. Public votes on funding approval were absent in each of the significant development projects considered here. It should not be assumed, however, that policy decisions made within authorities are entirely removed from external checks on power. For instance, in the World’s Fair case, the WFA is checked by the state legislature, which votes against authorizing funding for the development. Second, authorities permanently alter the ecology of local government (Judd & Smith, 2007). The creation of special-purpose authorities is not a short-term solution for the challenges associated with large-scale urban development projects; instead, authorities remain as critical elements of urban government long after states create them, likely to pursue their own institutional interests in addition to the initial goals established by their parent governments. For example, in the time since its first project at Navy Pier, the MPEA has expanded the McCormick Place convention center twice, attempted—but failed—to build a domed stadium for the Chicago Bears,

138  PART I    Governance and Political Economy planned a second redevelopment at the Pier, and has taken on the task of hotel management in its ownership of the Hyatt McCormick Place. The MPEA was discussed as a fiscal partner in Chicago’s failed bid to host the 2016 Olympics (Greising, 2007) and the ISFA had recently negotiated—unsuccessfully—with the Chicago Cubs baseball franchise to purchase Wrigley Field (Bergen, 2008). The intergovernmental triad in Chicago clearly represents more than a temporary political arrangement for short-term political benefit—the institutions affect city politics for decades after their creation. …

Notes   1

Though this expansive empirical study identifies the weak link between states and cities in urban scholarship, it focuses on previous eras and does not fill the gap I speak of earlier in this piece.   2 Stone (2005) has argued that regime theory, depending on its context, may indeed involve “intergovernmental channels of communication” (p. 330).   3 Banfield (1961) does treat the state of Illinois as an integral part of the machine era in Chicago, but most negotiations between mayors and governors, alderman and representatives, come down to winning votes, not building coalitions or generating economic development strategies. Also, Gove and Preston (1985) discuss Richard J. Daley’s ability to work with Republican governors, but question the assumption that he could dictate state decisions by mobilizing the Chicago contingent in the Illinois General Assembly. Weir (1996) analyzes the history of governor–mayor relations in Illinois and Chicago, finding that state-level funding has been critical to Chicago’s development   4 Washington’s work with state-level actors also complicates the argument that he could not utilize state resources as effectively as previous mayors (see Gove & Preston, 1985).   5 Donald Axelrod (1992) and the Urban Land Institute (1989) have also recognized Thompson’s fondness for the creation of authorities as a tool of economic development. Fittingly, he was appointed as chairman of the Illinois Sports Facilities Authority governing board in 2006.   6 Illinois has more special district governments than any other state (U.S. Census Bureau, 2002). The use of such governments for offloading municipal expenses has been a strategy of Chicago mayors in the past (Fuchs, 1992).   7 Private-sector representatives may not be directly involved in development decisionmaking or lobbying prior to their appointment, but have significant impact on outcomes once appointed to seats on authority boards.   8 In the case of the World’s Fair, when the triad approach produced a higher level of conflict, the funding never arrived. The World’s Fair Authority was established without fiscal backing and withered as a result.   9 While the World’s Fair project was unsuccessful, the final vote of approval for both the White Sox ballpark and Navy Pier’s redevelopment occurred during midnight sessions in the Illinois General Assembly. The next morning’s newspaper reveals a night of vote trading and lobbying by the governor, or a closed-door session in

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10

11

12 13

14

15 16 17

18 19

which the governor of Illinois has made offers to the mayor of Chicago regarding his/her wish list. In both cases, there is no decisive city council vote or referendum. The 1992 World’s Fair Authority was created before a funding package had been assembled. The ISFA was created and funded initially in 1986; the funding level was raised to $150 million before the White Sox agreed not to move to Florida. Neighborhood groups protested the Fair and Washington felt pressure to approach it differently than his predecessor, Jane Byrne (McClory, 1993; Mier, 1995); therefore, the placement of the Fair in an authority’s jurisdiction likely prolonged the plan’s existence. The White Sox purchased land in suburban Chicago before losing a referendum to fund the construction of a new stadium on the site (Spirou & Bennett, 2003, p. 67). This is an excellent example of why state politics and legislative action need to be considered more regularly in narratives and analyses of urban politics. The level of support for projects at the local level may have little meaning if state officials oppose a project. Insight on the NPDA is drawn from a personal interview with a former official. Also, many of the suggestions made in the Urban Land Institute (1989) report the NPDA commissioned were eventually implemented. This line of argument was offered by two former leaders of the MPEA in personal interviews conducted in early 2008. A former MPEA official supported this argument in a personal interview. The Metropolitan Fair and Exposition Authority, which had managed the convention center previously, was dissolved and McCormick Place was placed under the jurisdiction of the MPEA. Daley is quoted in one press report (Washburn, 2005) as saying that “[Edgar] had a political position … that it was good to beat up Chicago.” Stone (2008) has acknowledged the emergence of formalized growth coalitions but not necessarily their potential intergovernmental nature. He cites the City of Baltimore Development Corporation as an example (p. 306).

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CHAPTER 2   The Politics of Urban Economic Development in a New Era   141 Doig, J. W. (1983). ‘If I see a murderous fellow sharpening a knife cleverly … ’: The Wilsonian dichotomy and the public authority tradition. Public Administration Review, 43(4), 292–304. Doig, J. W., & Mitchell, J. (1992). Expertise, democracy, and the public authority model Groping toward accommodation. In J.Mitchell (Ed.), Public authorities and public policy: The business of government (pp. 17–30). Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Dold, B. (1987). Mayor demands more for Sox stadium board. Chicago Tribune, August 17, Tempo, 6. Egler, D. (1986a). Mayor tries new game plan for stadium. Chicago Tribune, June 28, News, 4. Egler, D. (1986b). Legislature may enlist in Sox stadium effort. Chicago Tribune, July 1, News, 1. Egler, D., & McCarron, J. (1986a). Sox, city pitch stadium plan to governor. Chicago Tribune, December 3, News, 1. Egler, D., & McCarron, J. (1986b). Thompson joins stadium team. Chicago Tribune, December 4, News, 1. Egler, D., & McCarron, J. (1986c). Sox stadium is safe at home. Chicago Tribune, December 6, News, 1. Eisinger, P. K. (1998). Partners for growth: State and local relations in economic development. In R. L. Hanson (Ed.), Governing partners (pp. 93–108). Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Foster, K. A. (1997). The political economy of special-purpose government. Washington, DC Georgetown University Press. Frug, G. E. (1999). City making: Building communities without building walls. Princeton, NJ Princeton University Press. Fuchs, E. R. (1992). Mayors and money: Fiscal policy in New York and Chicago. Chicago University of Chicago Press. Gainsborough, J. F. (2001). Bridging the city-suburb divide: States and the politics of regional cooperation. Journal of Urban Affairs, 23(5), 497–512. George, A. L., & Bennett, A. (2005). Case studies and theory development in the social sciences. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Gove, S. K., & Preston, M. B. (1985). State-local (Chicago) relations in Illinois: The Harold Washington era, 1984. Publius: The Journal of Federalism, 15(Summer), 143–154. Greising, D. (2007). McPier to fund 2016 bid. Chicago Tribune, March 14, News, 1, 17. Grimshaw, W. J. (1992). Bitter fruit: Black politics and the Chicago machine, 1931–1991. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Hamilton, D. K., Miller, D. Y., & Paytas, J. (2004). Exploring the vertical and horizontal dimensions of metropolitan regions. Urban Affairs Review, 40(2), 147–182. Henig, J. R., Hula, R. C., Orr, M., & Pedescleaux, D. S. (1999). The color of school reform Race, politics, and the challenge of urban education. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hunter, F. (1953). Community power structure: A study of decision makers. New York: Anchor Books. Illinois Sports Facilities Authority (2006). Annual report 2006. Available at http:// hallpcsupport.com/isfa/AR_2006.pdf, accessed November 5, 2007. Judd, D. R. (2003). Building the tourist city, Editor’s introduction. In D. R.Judd (Ed.), The infrastructure of play: Building the tourist city (pp. 3–18). Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe.

142  PART I    Governance and Political Economy Judd, D. R., & Smith, J. M. (2007). The new ecology of urban governance: Special purpose authorities and urban development. In R. Hambleton & J. S. Gross (Eds.), Governing cities in a global era: Urban innovation, competition, and democratic reform (pp. 151–160). Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave. Kaplan, J. (1989). Board named to revive pier. Chicago Tribune, July 18, Chicagoland, 1. Lawrence, M. (1987). Sox park measure squeaks by senate. Chicago Sun-Times, June 26, News, 21. Logan, J. R., & Molotch, H. L. (1987). Urban fortunes: The political economy of place. Berkeley: University of California Press. Longworth, R. C. (1985). A postmortem on the fair. Chicago Tribune, June 27, Perspec­ tive, 27. McCarron, J. (1985). Rift can be overcome on fair, Kramer says. Chicago Tribune, February 15, Chicagoland, 8. McCarron, J. (1986). Stadium developers win over Sox. Chicago Tribune, May 1, Chicagoland, 1. McCarron, J. (1989). City’s development wishes granted. Chicago Tribune, July 4, News, 1. McCarron, J., & Egler, D. (1985). Seeds of fair demise were planted early. Chicago Tribune, June 23, News, 1. McCarron, J., & Egler, D. (1987). Board for Sox park ready to be named. Chicago Tribune, April 10, Chicagoland, 3. McCarron, J., & Egler, D. (1988). Legislators vote to save Sox; bipartisan rally pushes deal through. Chicago Tribune, July 1, News, 1. McClory, R. (1993). The fall of the fair. In D.Simpson (Ed.), Chicago’s future in a time of change (pp. 388–398). Champaign, IL: Stipes Publishing Company. Metropolitan Pier and Exposition Authority (2002). Experience … 2002 annual report. Chicago Author. Metropolitan Pier and Exposition Authority (2006). Keeping pace with success: 2006 annual report. Chicago: Author. Metropolitan Pier and Exposition Authority (2007). Navy Pier selects two by four as new advertising agency. Press release. Available at http://www.mpea.com/ pdf/10_07AdAgency.pdf, accessed January 12, 2008. Metropolitan Pier and Exposition Authority (2008). About Navy Pier – History. Available at http://www.navypier.com/about/history.html, accessed September 17, 2008. Mier, R. (1995). Economic development and infrastructure: Planning in the context of progressive politics. In D. C. Perry (Ed.), Building the public city: The politics, governance, and finance of public infrastructure (pp. 71–102). Thousand Oaks, CA Sage Publications. Mirel, J. (2004). Detroit: “There is still a long road to travel, and success is far from assured.” In J. R. Henig & W. C. Rich (Eds.), Mayors in the middle: Politics, race, and mayoral control of urban schools (pp. 120–158). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Mossberger, K., & Stoker, G. (2001). The evolution of urban regime theory: The challenge of conceptualization. Urban Affairs Review, 36(6), 810–835. Neal, S. (1985). Fair’s ‘Music Man’ promises the world. Chicago Tribune, June 16, Perspective, 4.

CHAPTER 2   The Politics of Urban Economic Development in a New Era   143 Nice, D. C., & Fredericksen, P. (1995). The politics of intergovernmental relations (2nd ed.). Chicago: Nelson-Hall. Orr, M. (2004). Baltimore: The limits of mayoral control. In J. R. Henig & W. C. Rich (Eds.), Mayors in the middle: Politics, race, and mayoral control of urban schools (pp. 27–58). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Pagano, M. A. (1990). State-local relations in the 1990s. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 509, 94–105. Pelissero, J. P., Heschen, B. M., & Sidlow, E. I. (1991). Urban regimes, sports stadiums, and the politics of economic development agendas in Chicago. Policy Studies Review, 10(2/3), 117–129. Post, S. S., & Stein, R. M. (2000). State economies, metropolitan governance, and urbansuburban economic dependence. Urban Affairs Review, 36(1), 46–60. Purcell, M. (2000). The decline of the political consensus for urban growth: Evidence from Los Angeles. Journal of Urban Affairs, 22(1), 85–100. Recktenwald, W. (1989). The dust clears in legislature’s wake, Navy Pier bill a plum for Daley. Chicago Tribune, July 3, Chicagoland, 1. Sanders, H. T. (1992). Building the convention city: Politics, finance, and public investment in urban America. Journal of Urban Affairs, 14(2): 135–159. Sapotichne, J. (2007). Regime capacity and strategic rhetoric: Finding the winning frame in Seattle’s sports stadium debates. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago, April 12–15. Sbragia, A. M. (1996). Debt wish: Entrepreneurial cities, U.S. federalism, and economic development. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Shipps, D. (2004). Chicago: The national “model” reexamined. In J. R. Henig & W. C. Rich (Eds.), Mayors in the middle: Politics, race, and mayoral control of urban schools (pp. 59–95). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Shlay, A. B., & Giloth, R. (1987). The social organization of a land-based elite: The case of the failed Chicago 1992 World’s Fair. Journal of Urban Affairs, 9(4), 305–324. Simpson, D. (2001). Rogues, rebels, and rubber stamps: The politics of the Chicago City Council from 1863 to the present. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Smith, C. (2006). The plan of Chicago: Daniel Burnham and the remaking of the American city. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sonenshein, R. J., & Hogen-Esch, T. (2006). Bringing the state (government) back in: Home rule and the politics of secession in Los Angeles and New York City. Urban Affairs Review, 41(4), 467–491. Spielman, F. (2002). Dem win good for city, Daley says—casino, O’Hare growth could win with new guv. Chicago Sun-Times, November 7, News, 19. Spirou, C., & Bennett, L. (2003). It’s hardly sportin’: Neighborhoods, stadiums, and the new Chicago. DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press. Stone, C. N. (1989). Regime politics: Governing Atlanta, 1946–1988. Lawrence, KS University Press of Kansas. Stone, C. N. (2005). Looking back to look forward: Reflections on urban regime analysis. Urban Affairs Review, 40(3), 309–341. Stone, C. N. (2008). Urban politics then and now. In M. Orr & V. C. Johnson (Eds.), Power in the city: Clarence Stone and the politics of inequality (pp. 267–316). Lawrence, KS University Press of Kansas.

144  PART I    Governance and Political Economy Strahler, S. R. (1996). What is this? Council wars II? Guv-mayor fight is deeper than Meigs; how biz loses. Crain’s Chicago Business, September 9, News, 3. Strom, E. (2008). Rethinking the politics of downtown development. Journal of Urban Affairs, 30(1), 37–62. Turner, R. S. (1990). Intergovernmental growth management: A partnership framework for state-local relations. Publius: The Journal of Federalism, 20(Summer), 79–95. Urban Land Institute (1989). Navy Pier Chicago (prepared for the Navy Pier Development Authority). Washington, DC: Urban Land Institute. U.S. Census Bureau (2002). Government organization: 2002 census of governments. Available at http://www.census.gov/prod/2003pubs/gc021x1.pdf, accessed February 4, 2008. Washburn, G. (2005). Daley feels strongly about Edgar, but it’s not just one-sided. Chicago Tribune, October 2, Metro, 2. Washington State Public Stadium Authority (2004). Meet the PSA. Available at http:// www.stadium.org/meetPSA.asp, accessed October 22, 2007. Weir, M. (1996). Central cities’ loss of power in state politics. Cityscape: A Journal of Policy Development and Research, 2(2), 23–40. Weir, M., Wolman, H., & Swanstrom, T. (2005). The calculus of coalitions: Cities, suburbs, and the metropolitan agenda. Urban Affairs Review, 40(6), 730–760. Wille, L. (1997). At home in the Loop: How clout and community built Chicago’s Dearborn Park. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Wong, K. K., & Shen, F. X. (2002). Politics of state-led reform in education: Market competition and electoral dynamics. Educational Policy, 16(1), 161–192. Ziemba, S. (1982). $277 million plan for rebirth of Navy Pier. Chicago Tribune, May 28, News, 1 & 10.

CHAPTER 3 Public Power and Private Influence in Contemporary Cities Editors’ Introduction The increasing encroachment by private actors into the public sector, and public spaces brings with it profound changes and challenges. Private actors, by means of their (often somewhat invisible) ownership of what we consider public spaces—not only parks and benches, but also entire towns and, along with that, the public square—have gained a say regarding not only the way we can conduct ourselves, but also to the way we should think about and conceptualize the public and the private. Increasingly, the boundaries between the two are growing blurry, unrecognizable even, to the passing observer. Urban centers in particular are experiencing the proliferation of POPS— privately owned public spaces. They may feel the same as a public square, but the rules and regulations, which dictate the way we are allowed to conduct ourselves in these spaces, or what sorts of activities we may engage in, can be profoundly different. In Selection 8, Margaret Kohn addresses this changing concept of the public square, by tracing some of the legal history of protest and public deliberation in such spaces in which private regulations and public protest have clashed. She lays out several cases in which groups of people tried to make their opinions known—by leafleting or otherwise protesting in privately owned public spaces, such as company towns or shopping malls. The Supreme Court, in its decisions regarding protest or leafleting in shopping mall (as opposed to entire privately owned towns), has generally maintained that malls serve only a single purpose: shopping. Because they

DOI: 10.4324/9781315163635-4145

146  PART I    Governance and Political Economy do not cater to a multiplicity of activities, the Court has held that they should have more leeway in regulating people’s activities, as people are not bound to the space beyond the sole activity of shopping. In that single purpose, a mall, therefore, does not resemble a public square and should not be conceptualized as such. But should this conceptualization change if malls turn into multi-purpose entertainment complexes as they have recently done, comprising, for instance, a skating rink, a sports arena, a post office, several hotels, cafes, restaurants, and night clubs? If people do not spend a single part of their day in a truly public space, because they work, live, and play in spaces that are privately owned, should we not have to rethink the way we understand the narrowly defined “shopping mall”? So far, there has not been a legal answer from the country’s highest court, but that does not mean that the question is not important: business improvement districts (BIDs) are springing up all over our cities. Most urban residents are not even aware that they are standing in the midst of a BID when they go about their daily lives. Yet, private actors partially dictate the rules and regulations of BIDs, and they do so based on the amount of their investment into the BID, not based on the democratic principle of one person-one vote. How does the increasing privatization of our public squares impact our rights as democratic citizens? Can private actors increasingly dictate what we do in and with spaces we used to think of as public? The role and conception of urban citizens is also a major theme in Selection 9, which addresses another recent development: the sharing economy. Specifically, Katharina Knaus and Peer Illner address the complex issues of regulation, negotiation, and engagement with the home-sharing service Airbnb. Terms, such as “crowdsourcing” and citizen-based “sharing economy” seemingly challenge traditional notions of capitalist competition and consumption, and can even be seen by some as challenges to traditional capitalism. However, as Knaus and Illner show, these supposed challenges often mask the deeply powerful structures of private market forces encroaching on now domains. Airbnb, which claims to be a community tool for recessionshaken urban dwellers to supplement their income by privately renting their homes, or parts of their homes, capitalizes on the rhetoric of community, while in actuality exhibiting the same powerful capitalist structures as the traditional market forces. However, Knaus and Illner also fascinatingly demonstrate how the “community” of providers of Airbnb have organized to challenge these powerful private market forces, by employing organizing techniques resembling those of the struggling workers’ movement during the industrial era. Privatization is not only an issue when it comes to public space. It also reigns large in public education. A Washington Post report finds that the

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(publicly funded) privatization of public education in the United States is gaining ground—with very little public oversight (Strauss 2022). Charter schools, which receive public money but can be managed by private entities and have myriad opportunities to defy public education standards and requirements, are growing as part of a deeply concerning “school choice” movement (ibid.). The idea behind this is that students can opt out of the public school system and receive publicly funded vouchers to attend charter schools (or be homeschooled). However, many charter schools employ deeply discriminatory entry requirements, based on religion, sexual identity, or sexual preference. Such requirements directly conflict with the 1st Amendment, yet they are rampant at voucher schools in 74% of all states, according to the Post (ibid.). Worse yet, the report finds fraud and mismanagement run rampant in voucher schools, often due to little or no state oversight (ibid.). In Selection 10, Jon Valant provides a detailed overview of charter schools in the United States, and whether they live up to what they were intended to do—provide access to more educational opportunities and choices. The field of charter schools appears to be wide, and because of their variability it seems to be difficult to draw a definite conclusion—at least in terms of how they affect student outcomes vis-a-vis public schools. Privatization, it appears, can mean many things, but certainly does not always, as we are often led to believe, hold the promise of significant improvement. Instead it can, as illustrated by the different selections in this chapter, often lead to serious constitutional infringements on one’s personal rights and liberties. In conjunction, privatization movements in cities may, over time, not only fail to solve the issues they claim to address (such as inequality, low quality infrastructure, housing, parks, and education) but also actually exacerbate them for those who are most vulnerable. We do not, however, think that this is an unavoidable outcome. With the appropriate checks by the private sector, privatization may sometimes be an answer, especially in financially overburdened cities. Unchecked and left to its own devices, however, privatization will likely lead to more segregation and inequality, not only in cities but also across the country.

Reference Valerie Strauss. 2022. “Privatization of Public Education Gaining Ground, Report Says.” The Washington Post, April 18. https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/ 2022/04/18/privatization-of-public-education-gaining-ground/

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8 The Mauling of Public Space Margaret Kohn* Bridgewater Township is a community of 40,000 located in New Jersey. Like earlier cities that were traditionally situated at the intersection of transportation routes, it owes its location to the confluence of Routes 287 and 78, two superhighways. Although Bridgewater was originally a bedroom community serving professionals who worked in New York, it gradually developed its own local economy with offices, businesses, and services. What it lacked was a sense of place. Local residents dreamed of a town center, some ideal composite of a New England village green and a Tuscan piazza, a place where old people could gossip, young people could farsi vedere (make themselves seen), mothers could bring young children while getting a latte, a sandwich, or some postage stamps. After over a decade of discussion, in 1988 they inaugurated Bridgewater Commons—a mall.1 The Bridgewater Commons Mall was not originally the initiative of commercial real estate developers. After years of research and debate, local government planners and community groups decided that a carefully designed shopping mall was the form of development best suited to maintaining the small town’s quality of life and avoiding the strip mall aesthetic. Individual retailers could not provide the capital necessary to implement a comprehensive plan that included environmentally sensitive landscaping and rational traffic management. More importantly, a traditional downtown could not guarantee the most highly prized amenities: safety, cleanliness, and order. The Bridgewater Commons and hundreds of supermalls like it have long troubled architects and critics who bemoan the homogeneity, sterility, and banality of the suburbs.2 Approaching the mall primarily as an aesthetic or even a sociological issue, however, overlooks the enormous political consequences of the privatization of public space. Public sidewalks and streets are practically the only remaining available sites for unscripted political activity. They are the places where insurgent political candidates gather signatures, striking workers publicize their cause, and church groups pass out leaflets. It is true that television, newspapers, and direct mail constantly deliver a barrage of information, including political leaflets. But unlike the face-to-face politics that takes place in the public sphere, these forms for * Copyright © 2004 from ‘Chapter 4. The Mauling of Public Space’, Brave New Neighborhoods by Margaret Kohn, 1st Edition, pp. 54–71. Used with permission of Taylor & Francis Group, a division of Informa plc. Permission conveyed through Copyright Clearance Center, Inc.

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communication do not allow the citizen to talk back, to ask a question, to tell a story, to question a premise. The politics of the public sphere requires no resources—except time and perseverance. Public spaces are the last domains where the opportunity to communicate is not something bought and sold. And they are rapidly disappearing. Such places are not banned by authoritarian legislatures. The public is not dispersed by the police. Their disappearance is more benign but no less troubling. The technology of the automobile, the expansion of the federal highway system, and the growth of residential suburbs has changed the way Americans live. Today the only place that many Americans encounter strangers is in the shopping mall. The most important public place is now private. And that is probably not an accident. The privatization of public space poses a number of conceptual challenges for public policy makers. Does the ownership or use determine whether a particular place is truly private? How should the right to private property be weighed against the legitimate state interest in sustaining a public sphere? Does it violate the First Amendment right to free speech if a shopping mall prohibits orderly political speech? Are suburban malls meaningfully different from downtown developments? The United States Supreme Court has tried to answer these questions in a series of decisions that have determined government policy defining the public sphere. The Supreme Court’s doctrine in “the shopping mall cases” reflects a growing unwillingness to engage the broader political issues emerging from rapid social change. By insisting that the First Amendment only limits what government agencies can do, the Court has effectively closed its eyes to the privatization of public space.

The Shopping Mall Cases The Supreme Court addressed the implications of private ownership of quasi-public spaces in a series of cases decided between 1946 and 1980. The Court first considered the issue in 1946 in Marsh v. Alabama, which dealt with a Jehovah’s Witness who was arrested for distributing religious pamphlets in the business district of a company-owned town. The majority decided that the arrest violated the freedom of the press and freedom of religion guaranteed by the First Amendment and applied to the states under the Fourteenth Amendment. The opinion written by Justice Black emphasized that all citizens must have the same rights, regardless of whether they live in a traditional municipality or a company-owned town. He noted that a typical community of privately owned residences would not have had the power to pass a municipal ordinance forbidding the distribution of religious literature on street comers. Why then, should a corporation be allowed to do so? The company, Gulf Shipbuilding Corporation, based its argument on the common law and constitutional right to private property. If an individual does not have to allow Jehovah’s Witnesses into her home, why should the

150  PART I    Governance and Political Economy company have to allow them on its property? The court, however, rejected this logic. It cited a long list of precedents—cases involving bridges, roads, and ferries—to establish that the right to private property is not absolute. Especially when a private company performs public functions, it opens itself up to greater government scrutiny and regulation. Given that the town was freely accessible to outsiders, it implicitly invited in the general public, thereby voluntarily incurring quasi-public obligations. The concept of “invitee” went on to play an important role ID desegregation cases. According to the Court, “The more an owner, for his advantage, opens up his property for use by the public in general, the more do his rights become circumscribed by the statutory and constitutional rights of those who use it.” The opinion concluded that property rights must be weighed against other state interests. Justice Black emphasized that a democracy had a compelling state interest in maintaining free and open channels of communication so that all of its residents could fulfill their duties as citizens: “To act as good citizens they must be informed. In order to enable them to be properly informed their information must be uncensored.” A concurring opinion by Justice Frankfurter stated that fundamental civil liberties guaranteed by the Constitution must have precedence over property rights. Based on the reasoning in Marsh v. Alabama, it would seem likely that the right to free speech would apply to other private arenas that are similarly open to a broad public. In a 1972 decision, Lloyd Corp. v. Tanner, the Court considered whether First Amendment guarantees extended to the shopping mall.3 This time, however, the majority upheld the mall’s policy forbidding the distribution of handbills on its premises. The owners could exclude expressive conduct, even when it did not disrupt the commercial functions of the mall. Writing for the majority, Justice Powell argued that a shopping mall was not the functional equivalent of a company town, because it was not a space where individuals performed multiple activities. It was simply devoted to shopping. Although it was true that the shopping mall implicitly invited the general public onto its premises, this did not transform it into a public space. According to Powell, political activists misunderstood the invitation if they turned the mall into a public forum; the invitation to the public was only to shop. Moreover, because the First Amendment only limited “state action” there was no constitutional basis to apply it to private entities. In Lloyd v. Tanner the Court did not overrule Marsh v. Alabama; instead it emphasized how the two cases differed. The mall was no company town. Basically, the Court concluded that activists had other opportunities to engage in political activity. They could make use of the public roads and sidewalks on the perimeter of the shopping mall. The assumption was that citizens had other chances to be exposed to diverse ideas and viewpoints. Because they presumably spent at most part of their day at the shopping mall, they could become informed citizens elsewhere.

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Although the Court tried to emphasize the differences of fact between the two cases, it actually modified its view of the relevant doctrine. In the Lloyd decision there was no idealistic discussion of the free exchange of ideas necessary to maintain an informed citizenry. Rather than considering the goal of the First Amendment—presumably to foster the free expression characteristic of a democracy—the Court focused narrowly on the supposed absence of state action. It decided that private property does not “lose its private character merely because the public is generally invited to use it for designated purposes.” It is puzzling that the justices in Lloyd did not really analyze the logic of Marsh v. Alabama on the critical issue of state action. In Marsh, Justice Black suggested that the enforcement of state criminal trespass laws constituted state action. If the state may make no law abridging freedom of speech, then it cannot pass a criminal trespass statue penalizing a citizen simply for engaging in nondisruptive expressive conduct in a place where he or she would be legitimately allowed to enter. This same logic was used in a much more famous case, Shelley v. Kraemer, which was decided by the same court in 1948. In that case, the Supreme Court struck down a restrictive covenant preventing residents from selling their homes to blacks. The contract was undeniably private, however, it could not be enforced without “the active intervention of the state ‘courts, supported by the full panoply of state power.” According to this decision, private actors could not use the police and the courts to enforce practices that violate constitutional rights. In Lloyd v. Tanner (1972) the Supreme Court decided to overlook these precedents, assuming a much narrower definition of what constitutes state action. The last shopping mall case, Pruneyard Shopping Center v. Robins (1980) dealt with a group of high school students who attempted to gather signatures for a petition protesting a U.N. resolution condemning Zionism. The California State Supreme Court originally found in favor of the students, ruling that the state’s criminal trespass law would constitute state action for the of the First Amendment. The shopping mall owners appealed to the United States Supreme Court, claiming that their Fifth Amendment right not to be deprived of “private property, without due process of law” was violated by the California decision. They argued that the mall was no public forum. To require that the mall allow political solicitation was tantamount to “taking without just compensation.” The owners also claimed that the right to exclude others is an essential component of the definition of private property. The Pruneyard decision, which governs to this day, articulated a mediating position. The Supreme Court rejected the mall owner’s claim to absolute dominion over its property. Drawing upon a long history of precedents regarding public regulation of private property, the court concluded that the due process clause only required that the laws “not be unreasonable, arbitrary, or capricious and that the means selected shall have a real and

152  PART I    Governance and Political Economy substantial relation to the objective sought.” The right to exclude others would only be decisive if the mall owners could prove that allowing orderly political speech would substantially decrease the economic value of their project.4 The Court, however, also rejected the students’ claims to protection under the free speech clause of the First Amendment. Because the facts of the case were substantially the same as those in Lloyd v. Tanner, the Court saw no reason to reconsider the issue. They still insisted that the mall was private and therefore beyond the reach of the Bill of Rights. But there was a second issue at stake. The students had challenged the shopping center’s policy under both the U.S. and the California State Constitution. The language of the California free speech clause was more expansive. Article 1, § 2, of the California Constitution provides: Every person may freely speak, write and publish his or her sentiments on all subjects, being responsible for the abuse of this right. A law may not restrain or abridge liberty of speech or press.

The U.S. Supreme Court found that there was no reason why a state or federal statute could not guarantee access to the public areas of private malls. In other words, the Court did not find any constitutional prohibition against legislation protecting political speech in places where citizens were normally allowed to be. This finding was consistent with an earlier decision, Hudgens v. NLRB (1976), which held that striking workers had no First Amendment right to picket in a mall, but they could assert such a right under federal labor laws protecting the processes associated with collective bargaining.5 Since the decision fourteen states have considered whether their own state constitutions protect expressive conduct in shopping malls. Only five—California, Oregon, New Jersey, Colorado, and Massachusetts—recognized broader protections for speech.6

Privatization and Public Policy Over twenty years have passed since the Supreme Court’s decision. Although the law has not changed in that period, society has. There is something quaint and anachronistic about reading the old shopping mall cases. They describe the world we take for granted as something new and marvelous and they could not even imagine the world in which we would soon live. Writing in 1972, Justice Powell described the Lloyd Center in Portland, Oregon like this: The Center embodies a relatively new concept in shopping center design. The stores are all located within a single large, multilevel building complex sometimes referred to as the “Mall.” Within this complex, in addition to the stores, there are parking facilities, malls, private sidewalks, stairways,

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escalators, gardens, an auditorium, and a skating rink. Some of the stores open directly on the outside public sidewalks, but most open on the interior privately owned malls. Some stores open on both. There are no public streets or public sidewalks within the building complex, which is enclosed and entirely covered except for the landscaped portions of some of the interior malls.7

This futuristic mall had 60 shops and 1000 parking spaces. Compared to today’s supermalls, the Lloyd Center is a neighborhood comer store. By 1990 there were over 300 mega-supermalls with at least five department stores and three hundred shops. The West Edmonton Mall has over 800 shops, 11 department stores, 110 restaurants, 20 movie theaters, 13 night clubs, a chapel, a large hotel, and a lake.8 In the United States there are twenty-three square feet of shopping mall space for every person.9 In 1972, the Court concluded that this new concept in shopping, “sometimes referred to as the ‘Mall’,” in no way resembled a company town. It seemed obvious that a mall was simply devoted to a single activity, shopping, whereas a town was defined by the physical proximity of diverse spaces and activities, housing services, leisure and work, consumption, education, and production. A mall is a place you visit; a town is a place you live. But this has been slowly changing.10 Industry watchers report that the average visit to a ‘1eisure time destination” (a mall with sophisticated design elements, restaurants, and movie theaters) lasted four hours as compared to just one hour at a conventional mall.11 The mall has become an entertainment mecca, a major employer, and a premier vacation destination. The Travel Industry Association of America (TIA) reported that shopping is the number one vacation activity in America. The Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota attracts 42.5 million visitors annually.12 Its hundreds of retail establishments are not the only attraction: it has a wedding chapel, the nation’s largest indoor amusement park, a post office, a police station, and a school. The mall is also a workplace. The West Edmonton Mall has over 15000 employees. Although they do not manufacture automobiles or aircraft carriers, they do produce the spiral of fantasy, desire, and consumption that is the basis of the North American service economy. The mall is becoming not only a genuine multi-use facility, but a completely self-contained homotopia of suburban life. In the morning the doors open to waiting seniors, the famous mall-walkers who appreciate the controlled climate, cleanliness, and safety. At night the security guards have to herd out the lingering teenagers, who are in no rush to go home to their monotonous housing developments.13 The mall is clearly the nodal point of social life, but is it the equivalent of a downtown business district? Not exactly. The shopping mall is so attractive because it combines the pleasures of public life with the safety and familiarity of the private

154  PART I    Governance and Political Economy realm. Ironically, the suburban megamall was intended to be an oasis of urbanity and civilization. Victor Gruen, the Viennese architect who designed the prototype of the modern mall, was motivated by a progressive vision. He wanted to recreate a vibrant, pedestrian-oriented; multi-use area that captured the excitement of urban space. An immigrant from Vienna, he was inspired by the glass-enclosed atriums of Europe, particularly the gallerias of Milan and arcades of Paris. In 1956 he built Southdale in Edina, Minnesota, the first multi-level, enclosed; climate-controlled mall. He thought that the mall could serve as a community center and nodal point for civic identity in the suburbs.14 He realized that many people long for the vitality, diversity, beauty, and stimulation of public space. Gruen astutely predicted that when public space is not available, people would flock to private simulacra. But the private provision of public places is a Faustian bargain. Once developers possess the power of property rights, they usually exercise them to create the highly orchestrated and controlled environments that eviscerate the diversity that animates public space. Following in Gruen’s footsteps, contemporary mall designers have used their formidable skills to simulate the old-fashioned downtown of our imaginations. Faux antiquarian signs suggest that shopping corridors are actually city streets and the central atrium is the town square.15 Some malls, such as Faneuil Hall Marketplace in Boston, incorporate restored historical buildings in order to create the atmosphere of reassuring urbanity that many Americans identify with the past. Other malls play freely with period and place in order to incorporate images widely associated with a sophisticated and alluring public life. The Borgota, a mall in Scottsdale, Arizona, for example, was built to resemble a walled village in thirteenth-century Italy. Replete with an imitation church bell tower, bricks imported from Rome, and signs in Italian, it appeals to affluent consumers’ fantasies about public space.16 These design elements reflect the developers’ claim that the mall is a “city within a city” (The Mall of America) or “an urban village” (Universal City Walk).17 When animal rights protesters went to court to gain access to the “public” areas of the Mall of America, they tried to make use of the mall’s semiotic system for their own ends. They claimed that the mall presented itself as a multi-use downtown business district and therefore should be governed by the principles set out in Marsh v. Alabama. Faced with petitioners trying to engage in protest activity, the Mall of America, however, quickly retreated from the semiotics of “Main Street USA” and embraced a more conventional defense of private property. In some cases, the claim that malls are contemporary community centers is based on more than imagineering.18 Increasingly, the mall is a civic center as well as a shopping destination. The local and county government in Knoxville, Tennessee, for example, has located essential government services

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in a shopping mall on the periphery of town, the Knoxville Center. In an effort to “take the services to the people,” the city encourages Knoxville citizens to visit “City Hall at the Mall,” where they can pay their property taxes, renew their drivers’ licenses, mail letters, and apply for marriage licenses. There is also a police station and a community room.19 The consequence of this convenience is that the shopping center effectively serves as a moat of private space that insulates public functionaries from protest activity. The leasing arrangement opens up a potentially Kafkaesque scenario in which the aggrieved citizens try vainly to gain access to the city hall only to be turned away at the gates of the mall by unaccountable private security forces. Lest this scenario seem fantastic, imagine a group of antiwar activists who want to deliver a petition to the city government, but they are turned away at the entrance to the mall because they are wearing T-shirts that say “Give Peace a Chance.” The “City Hall at the Mall” may be an extreme example, but it is emblematic of a trend toward multi-use malls. An April 1999 survey by the journal Shopping Center World found that half of the 150 new projects under construction are multi-use malls. Some of these are the New Urbanist-inspired developments that try to mimic the appeal of old-fashioned downtowns. … They link higher density housing with office and retail space, all unified by architectural cues evoking the tum of the century. Fifty of the new multi-use malls include office space, libraries, housing, or hotels. One such project is the new Towers at Zona Rosa, a shopping mall situated ten minutes from downtown Kansas City. Although the plan relies on 30,000 foot department stores to anchor the retail plaza, it also includes loftstyle apartments situated above boutiques and cafes. Underground parking, decorative street lamps, indigenous plants, and outdoor tables are among the lifestyle-enhancing amenities. As theme parks, megamalls, and gated communities merge, nostalgic recreations of the village green replace actual public space.20 Living at the mall might still seem unusual, but it is a culmination of a dynamic that has been accelerating throughout the 1990s—the emergence of what Joel Garreau has called Edge Cities. The growth of Edge Cities reflects a complete transformation of the spatial structure of postwar American life. The typical pattern of bedroom communities situated along the outskirts of urban cores is disappearing. He reports that Americans no longer sleep in the suburbs and work in the city. In dozens of cities including Houston, Boston, Tampa, and Denver, there is more office space outside the central business district than within it. This new office space is built in Edge Cities, suburbs that now incorporate millions of square feet of commercial development.21 There are undoubtedly positive sides of this development. As more companies relocate to the suburbs, the average American’s commute time decreases. But as workplaces become more and more decentralized, the

156  PART I    Governance and Political Economy density needed to support public transportation such as commuter railroads also disappears. Your suburban office park may be closer to your home, but it is probably not served by the subway, which leads to greater automobile dependence, traffic congestion, pollution, and the blight of endless parking lots. It becomes increasingly commonplace to move from home to office to shopping mall in the automobile. The Edge City citizen need never traverse public space. It becomes possible to spend an entire day or lifetime without encountering street corners, bus stops, or park benches. The new Edge City geography poses a challenge to the doctrine established by the Supreme Court. If private space takes on a public character in cases like the company town when it colonizes every aspect of life, then it IS time to reconsider the character of the mall. But this is unlikely to happen. As recently as 1992, the Supreme Court held_ that labor organizers had no right to try to contact potential members by passing out leaflets m the parking lot of a Lechmere’s store, this despite the fact that the only alternative space was a 46 foot wide grassy strip separating the lot from the highway.22 In 1999 the Minnesota State Supreme Court heard a challenge from an animal rights group that was prevented from peacefully protesting in the common area of the 4.2 million square foot Mall of America. The protesters argued that the mall was a public space because it had been heavily subsidized by the state, which provided $186 million in public financing.23 The Justices found that “neither the invitation to the public to shop and be entertained … nor the public financing used to develop the property are state action for the purposes of free speech” under the Minnesota Constitution.24

Politics and the Public Sphere This string of defeats is a setback for political activists and proponents of an active public life. But it could have the unintended consequence of channeling debate over privatization into the political arena and out of the closed chambers of the court. If judicial intervention will not protect the public sphere, then political action still presents an alternative. Congress or state legislatures could pass statutes mandating that malls of a certain size must provide access to community groups. They could also establish guidelines to extend broader protections for political activity. One way to do this would be to pass legislation applying speech and petition guarantees to the functional equivalents of traditional public forums. As indicated in the Pruneyard decision, there is no constitutional provision that would invalidate these kinds of laws. Because labor unions are dependent on tactics such as the picket line, they would be powerful proponents of such a law and useful allies for other activist groups fighting to maintain access to public space. As the Seattle-inspired euphoria wanes, the struggle for such legislation could unify labor and other soC1al movements.

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Even in areas where such tactics were unsuccessful at the state level it would still be possible to adopt similar strategies at the local level. The obvious place to start is to support downtown business districts and other public places that still encourage diversity and invite political activity. But this individualist solution by itself, is naive. Collective action is also necessary. When new large-scale mall developments are proposed, citizens have the most leverage to demand some form of continued public access. The support of local government agencies, town councils, and planning boards is crucial for a project on the scale of the modern mall. By building and upgrading roads, modifying zoning, and approving permits, localities still have bargaining power over some aspects of development. They could negotiate a policy guaranteeing free access to a community booth or public courtyard in the mall.25 For example, in 1991 the Hahn Company, which owns thirty malls in California, signed an agreement with the American Civil Liberties Union that allows leafletting and petitioning in most of its malls. In New York, Democratic state legislators have introduced a bill mandating that privately owned complexes with at least 20 stores and 250,000 square feet of commercial space designate an area where citizens can congregate to engage in non-disruptive political activity.26 In 1988 a similar bill was defeated in the state legislature.27 Why are these tactics seldom even employed let alone successful? Although malls like the one in Bridgewater manage to preserve natural oases such as “Mac’s Brook,” they fail to protect oases of publicness in a privatizing world. And this is not only the fault of greedy developers. Most people do not value the disruption and unease caused by other people’s political speech. One of the appeals of the mall is precisely that it provides an environment carefully designed to exclude any source of discomfort. As Benjamin Barber put it, shopping malls and theme parks sell a sanitized substitute for public life “where people can experience the thrill of the different without taking any risks.”28 The soothing lighting, polished surfaces, pleasant temperature, and enticing displays are not the only allure; part of the fantasy involves entering a world where no homeless person, panhandler, or zealot can disturb the illusion of a harmonious world. We appreciate free speech in the abstract but often avoid it in reality. In this mauling of public space, democratic theorists have confronted extremely sophisticated marketing experts, and the democratic theorists have been the losers. The political theorists who are most concerned with democracy have failed to offer a compelling rationale to challenge the privatization of public space. By concentrating on the value of speech rather than the importance of space, they turn the public sphere into an abstraction. We need to engage in more careful reflection on the reasons why we should protect free speech and public space. In academic circles, theorists argue that deliberation between citizens is the most promising way to reach rational political decisions. Moreover, they

158  PART I    Governance and Political Economy stress that rational, public-spirited discussions are necessary to legitimate democratic procedures and make sure that politics does not degenerate into mere struggles over power. These theories of deliberative democracy are indebted to Jürgen Habermas’s influential work on the ideal speech situation. The basic idea of the ideal speech situation is something like this: when we engage in conversation we assume that other participants are telling the truth, speaking sincerely, and oriented toward mutual understanding. When these conditions are realized, then a rational consensus can emerge.29 I believe that one reason for the popularity of deliberative democracy is that it is based on a certain optimism about the efficacy of ideas. Although our convictions may also be resistant to change, they are much more malleable than the built environment. Confronted with a landscape filled with strip malls, decaying supermalls, forbidding seas of concrete parking lots, and urban high-rises isolated in unkempt wastelands, it is tempting to focus on democratic theories rather than the more intractable problem of democratic practices. At first it seems as if this emphasis on deliberative democracy is precisely what is needed to reinvigorate our commitment to the public sphere, whether it is comprised of street corners with soap boxes and speakers or their modem equivalents. Deliberative democracy reinforces traditional justifications of the speech clause of the First Amendment. But the concept of deliberation will not be useful if it emphasizes the rationality that emerges from the ideal speech situation. Let’s face it. Nothing approaching the ideal speech situation ever happens in the mall. The ideal speech situation is basically an extremely idealized depiction of the norms of scholarly journals or conferences. We need free speech and public places not because they help us, as a society, reach a rational consensus but because they disrupt the consensus that we have already reached too easily. Reasonable arguments often just reinforce distance, whereas public space establishes proximity. This proximity has distinctive properties that democratic theorists often overlook. We can learn something from facing our fears and evasions that we cannot learn from debating principles. The panhandler and the homeless person—they do not convince us by their arguments. Rather, their presence conveys a powerful message. They reveal the rough edges of our shiny surfaces. The union picketer and right-to-lifer confront us with meaningful and enduring conflict. Provocative speech cannot be something that happens elsewhere-in academic journals, conferences, mass mailings, and highly scripted town meetings. It must sometimes be literally in your face for it to have any impact. For a robust democracy we need more than rational deliberation. We need public places that remind us that politics matter. In New Jersey, at least, malls will be part of this public. That is the implication of a decision reached by the New Jersey State Supreme Court on June 13, 2000. In a unanimous vote, the Court held that Mill Creek, another

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New Jersey mall, could not restrict free speech by forbidding political groups from leafletting. Although the owners could place reasonable restrictions on expressive conduct to make sure that politics did not disrupt the commercial activities of the mall, they could not deny access to the only place left in New Jersey where there is an opportunity for face-to-face contact with large groups of people. By a circuitous route, the dream of Bridgewater comes true and the residents will get a commons.30

The Mall Goes Downtown: Business Improvement Districts … Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) have been at the forefront of the attempt to apply the logic of the shopping mall to downtown centers. There are over 1000 BIDs in the United States and more than forty in New York City alone.31 BIDs are geographically contiguous areas that vote to assess property owners a special fee in order to provide additional services. These services include sanitation, security, and landscaping. Some BIDs employ uniformed personnel to provide tourists with directions and discourage criminal activity. Others install benches, enforce uniform exterior decor standards, and distribute maps featuring local businesses. They have been widely credited in the press for improving the quality of life in downtown commercial districts. BIDs have been popular with both city officials and business owners. For government officials, they provide additional tax revenue to fund needed services in the most visible areas of the city. Business interests support BIDs because the structure allows them greater control over their own tax payments. Revenue collected through the BID is spent exclusively in the district and reflects the priorities of business owners. Because assessments are mandatory, setting up a BID overcomes the free-rider problem that plagues voluntary associations such as the Chamber of Commerce. At the same time, business interests maintain complete fiscal control, thereby avoiding the interference of government bureaucrats, local residents, and other citizens. With budgets in the tens of millions of dollars, these publicly regulated, private governments are reshaping the political landscape of downtown. The proliferation of Business Improvement Districts (a phenomenon that goes by many names including special assessment district or business improvement zone) is a response to competition from the suburban shopping mall. The BID is, in effect, a centralized management structure that allows dispersed downtown retailers to imitate and incorporate successful elements of the mall. For a shopping mall it is fairly easy to provide common spaces, maintain cleanliness, and orchestrate a high degree of visual and spatial coherence. Because the entire mall is owned by a single developer who leases

160  PART I    Governance and Political Economy space to individual stores. Centralized control is guaranteed through property rights, rules, and detailed lease restrictions.32 In most downtown business districts, streets and plazas are public; small businesses coexist alongside large chains in buildings that they may either rent or own. The BID, unlike the mall, has to rely on governmental powers such as eminent domain, taxation, fines, and zoning in order to mimic the effects of centralized control. The enabling legislation in Arkansas gives some idea of just how wide-ranging the power of business improvement districts can be. They are allowed: (1) To acquire, construct, install, operate, maintain, and contract regarding pedestrian or malls, plazas, sidewalks or moving sidewalks, parks, parking lots, parking garages, offices, urban residential facilities including, without limitation, apartments, condominiums, hotels, motels, convention halls, rooms, and related facilities, and buildings and structures to contain any of these facilities, bus stop shelters, decorative lighting, benches or other seating furniture, sculptures, telephone booths, traffic signs, fire hydrants, kiosks, trash receptacles, marquees, awnings or canopies, walls and barriers, paintings or murals, alleys, shelters, display cases, fountains, child-care facilities, restrooms, information booths, aquariums or aviaries, tunnels and ramps, pedestrian and vehicular overpasses and underpasses; (2) To landscape and plant trees, bushes and shrubbery, grass, flowers, and each and every other kind of decorative planting; (3) To install and operate, or to lease, public music and news facilities; (4) To construct and operate childcare facilities (5) To construct lakes , dams , and water ways of whatever size; (6) To employ and provide special police facilities and personnel for the protection and enjoyment of the property owners and the general public using the facilities of the district; (7) To prohibit or restrict vehicular traffic on the streets within the district as the governing body may deem necessary and to provide the means for access by emergency vehicles to or in these areas; (8) To remove, by agreement or by the power of eminent” domain, any existing structures or signs of any description in the district not conforming to the plan of improvement; and (9) To do everything necessary or desirable to effectuate the plan of improvement for the district.33 In other words, BIDs can exercise far-reaching governmental powers against individual property owners in order to transform an existing neighborhood into a “managed environment” with quaint matching signs and manicured plazas. In some cases they can even eliminate seedy businesses that might scare off the target consumer demographic. All this is done with minimal input from neighborhood residents, citizen groups, or even commercial tenants.34 Business Improvement Districts have imitated the environment of the sub-urban shopping rna1l as well as its management structure. The shopping mall, like the theme park, tries to create an atmosphere “in which the emphasis on safety and tidiness is supposed to make visitors feel secure and

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happy so they’ll spend money and come back.”35 To this end, BIDs devote, on average, twenty percent of their budget to sanitation and twenty-five percent to security.36 These downtown shopping districts try to achieve a mix of urban and suburban values. Their appeal is due to the energy, variety, visual stimulation, architectural distinctiveness, and cultural opportunities distinctive of urban centers.37 At the same time they mimic the safety, cleanliness, order, and familiarity that has proven such an effective formula in suburban malls. This allows consumers to enjoy the traditionally urban pleasures of proximity to diverse strangers in a setting where any risk of threat, disruption, disorientation, or discomfort has been removed.38 This is a formula that was perfected in “festival marketplaces” such as Faneuil Hall in Boston, Riverwalk in New Orleans, the Cannery in San Francisco, and South Street Seaport in New York. Each project transformed a historic district into a zone of leisure and consumption, filled with restaurants, chain boutiques, and kiosks specializing in local color. Wildly successful from a commercial point of view, these projects have been criticized for transforming distinctive, mixed-use districts into formulaic, sanitized tourist traps.39 Festival marketplaces sell a simulacra of the city as tableau or spectacle, something to be enjoyed visually but not experienced kinesthetically: the city without its smells, sensations, or dangers. They cleverly integrate design cues that evoke nostalgia for an imagined urban past with the safety, cleanliness, and familiarity of the suburban mall.

Social and Political Consequences of Business Improvement Districts Whereas most commentators have focused on an aesthetic critique of festival marketplaces and the Disneyfication of downtown, they overlook the political and social consequences of this transformation, particularly the impact of Business Improvement Districts on democratic governance. Bills pose several challenges to a democratic polity. First, political influence in a Business Improvement District’s usually directly proportional to the value of one’s property, thereby violating the democratic principle of one-person, one-vote. Second, BIDs increase the impact of the already powerful business community on local government. Finally, BIDs, as private, nonprofit organizations, may be able to circumvent the constitutional provisions that require local governments to protect the civil liberties of their citizens. In San Francisco, like most municipalities, the creation of a BID and its priorities depend on the support of the majority of property owners in the district. But all property owners do not have equal votes. Votes are apportioned in relation to the value of commercial property, therefore a

162  PART I    Governance and Political Economy very small cadre could effectively control the decisions of the BID. Although oligarchical control is acceptable, a monarchy is ruled out, at least in San Francisco, where the weighted vote of one individual cannot surpass forty percent.40 There have been several court cases challenging the anti-democratic decision-making structure of Business Improvement Districts. The most notable decision involves New York’s Grand Central BID, which encompasse’s 71 million square feet of commercial space (nineteen percent of Manhattan’s total office space) and has a budget of over $10 million. Robert Kessler, a shareholder in a co-op apartment building in the district, argued that the governance structure, which guaranteed thirty-one seats to property owners, seventeen seats to tenants, and four seats to government appointees, violated the constitutional principle of one-person, one-vote. In 1997 the United States District Court found in favor of the BID and the decision was upheld a year later by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. From a legal perspective the issue was how to interpret the precedent established m Avery v. Midland County, the case in which the Supreme Court applied the doctrine of one-person, one-vote to local government. Although the Court dearly stated that cities and counties must guarantee personhood suffrage, it left open the question as to whether this doctrine applied to the myriad diverse and overlapping sub- and supra-local institutions. The Supreme Court noted that “a special-purpose unit of government assigned the performance of functions affecting definable groups of constituents more than other constituents” might be exempt from the principle of one-person, one-vote.41 In subsequent litigation, the court recognized at least one such exception. It held that the governing board of a local watershed management district designed to provide irrigation could be elected exclusively by agricultural interests.42 In Kesslar, United States Circuit Court Judge Kearse concluded that the Grand Central Business Improvement District (BID) was similar to the water management district: it existed for the purpose of promoting business. Due to its limited scope and disproportionate impact on property owners, one-person one-vote did not apply.43 Although it is certainly true that Business Improvement Districts exist in order to promote business interests, they still have a significant impact on local residents. The range of services provided by well-funded BIDs—security, sanitation, social services, and capital improvements—is similar to that of local government. Furthermore, the Grand Central BID’s foray into social services illustrates some of the dangers that rise when a business lobby takes on quasi-governmental power. The controversy involved a program designed by the Grand Central Partnership (a Business Improvement District) to tackle the problem of homelessness by providing shelter and job training: There were two accusations levied against the program, which resulted in litigation.44 Over forty participants in the job-training program claimed that

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the violated state and federal minimum wage laws. Under the auspices of “job training,” homeless people were paid $1.16 per hour to serve as outreach workers.45 The second accusation dealt with the nature of the work that fell under the category of “out-reach.” Four former outreach workers claimed that they were told by supervisors to use all means necessary in order to remove homeless people from the district. They admitted to beating homeless and destroying their belongings. These statements corroborated the stories of homeless people who claimed they had been beaten and threatened by Partnership employees.46 After an investigation, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) requested that the BID return the unused portion of a $547,000 grant that had been awarded to subsidize its work the homeless. Andrew Cuomo, assistant secretary of HUD, explained, “We are not in the business of subsidizing thuggery.”47 The example of the HUD grant also illustrates another under-appreciated political consequence of the proliferation of Bills. Although Bills are widely lauded for raising additional tax revenue from businesses, they also are more effective at competing for scarce resources from city coffers. This is another lesson that Bills have learned from shopping mall developers, who have been very successful at getting a variety of government subsidies in order to lure commercial development to a particular locality. In the suburbs, these subsidies usually include tax abatements and public funds for site development and roads. Bills have made downtown more effective at lobbying for the enactment and enforcement of pro-business laws and gaining resources such as extra police protection or direct subsidies.48 To take one example, the Wall Street BID offered to offset some of the costs (towards space and equipment) if New York City located a police substation in the district. Even though it was not an under-served area, the police department complied.49 Decisions such as that one further exacerbate inequalities between neighborhoods in the distribution of essential services. Not only do Business Improvement Districts benefit from their ability to pay for higher levels of service, they may also receive a greater proportion of city resources, as cost-sharing rather than need becomes a criterion for distributing scarce resources. Although it is true that a voluntary Chamber of Commerce, large corporation, or interest group will also be effective at influencing local government, the BID formalizes this influence by creating a strong institutional mechanism. Bills aspire to imitate the controlled environment and unified management of the shopping mall but public ownership of the streets and common spaces imposes a serious limitation on their ability to do so. Unlike mall owners, local police officers are limited in their ability to eject homeless people, preachers, street performers, and leafletters from common spaces downtown. But what happens if private security forces do so? Take, for example the homeless people who were intimidated and forced to leave the Grand Central District. Had the police tried to evict them, they could have complained to

164  PART I    Governance and Political Economy the city review board m charge of police misconduct. The homeless victims also could have brought a complaint under a federal statute that provides redress to any citizen deprived of any right secured by the Constitution and laws. But because this statute only applies to rights violations undertaken by a person “acting under color of law,”50 neither of these remedies is available to someone intimidated or threatened by a private security force.51 This raises the possibility that local governments may rely on private proxies to employ tactics that are forbidden to government actors. Although the Bill of Rights prevents the government from limiting individuals’ right to free speech, movement, and assembly, it is unclear what would happen if a private government such as a BID tried to do so. Imagine a scenario in which a Business Improvement District adopted a code of conduct that banned skateboarding, lying on benches, loitering, and leafletting. A BID could claim that it was not a state actor, and therefore the Constitution did not apply. If this failed, the city could lease or give the streets, sidewalks, and plazas to the BID, which had already assumed the cost of policing and maintaining them. Armed with this designation as private property, the BID would be a step closer to its goal of transforming downtown into a specialty mall.

Conclusion The malling of America is not limited to the suburbs. The shopping mall is an icon of fantasy, leisure, and consumption at the same time as it is a symbol of homogeneity, sterility, market stratification, and social control. If Rem Koolhaas is right and shopping provides the only public space that still exists, then the difference between the city street and the suburban mall may be diminishing. …52 The growing influence of Business Improvement Districts is problematic for two reasons. The governance structure of most Bills violates norms of democratic accountability by giving a disproportionate voice to property owners over other community interests and possibly by circumventing statues and principles ensuring the protection of civil liberties. Bills also exacerbate existing inequalities in the provision of government services in order to create marketable “Brand Zones” within the city. It is not surprising that the wealthy and powerful would prefer to govern themselves without interference from everyone else. What is surprising is that a democracy is willing to let them.

Notes   1

The story of Bridgewater is recounted in Joel Garreau’s Edge City: Life on the New Frontier (New York: Doubleday, 1991), 42-45.   2 John Hannigan, “The Saturday Essay: Who Wants to Spend Their life in a Theme Park?” The Independent, Nov. 28, 1998, T1.

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In an earlier case, Food Employees v. Logan Valley Plaza 391 U.S. 308 (1968) the court ruled that a labor union could picket a supermarket located in a shopping mall, despite the objections of the mall manager. For a full discussion of the shopping mall cases, see Brady C. Williamson and James A. Friedman, “State Constitutions: The Shopping Mall Cases” University of Wisconsin Law Review (1998), 883-903; Curtis J. Berger, “Pruneyard Revisited: Political Activity on Private lands,” N. Y.U. Law Review 66 (1991), 663-691.   4 For a critical view of this argument, see Richard Epstein, “Takings, Exclusivity and Speech: The Legacy of Pruneyard v. Robins,” The University of Chicago Law Review 64 (Winter 1997), 21-56.  5 Hudgens v. NLRB 424 U.S. 507 (1976) was an important decision because it overturned Food Employees v. Logan Valley Plaza 391 U.S. 308 (1968), the first shopping mall case. The decision held that striking workers did have a First Amendment right to protest unfair labor practices in front of their employer’s store, even though it was located in a mall. In weighing the issues, the court concluded that the employees had no alternative place to protest, inasmuch as their message was directly linked to the commercial activity of a store located in the mall. In contrast, Hudgens stated that “property does not lose its private character merely because the public is generally invited to use it for designated purposes.”  6 Mark Alexander, “Attenation, Shoppers: The First Amendment in the Modern Shopping Mall,” Arizona Law Review 41 (Spring 1999), 1-47. Alexander notes that many of the nine states which have rejected petitioners’ free speech claims rely on the Supreme Court doctrine of “state action” even though their own constitutional provisions provide a broader guarantee similar to the language in the California constitution.  7 Lloyd Corp. v. Tanner 407 U.S. 551 (1972).   8 Margaret Crawford, “The World in a Shopping Mall,” in Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and End of Public Space, ed. Michael Sorkin (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992), 3.   9 Eds. Chuihua Judy Chung, Jeffrey Inaba, Rem Koolhaas, and Sze Tsung Leong, Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping (Cologne: Taschen, 2001). 10 For a detailed account of the transformation of the shopping mall, see William Severini Kowinski, The Malling of America: An Inside Look at the Great Consumer Paradise (New York: Morrow, 1985). 11 Jim Walker, “Visionary’s Quest: Columbus-Based Developer Yaromir Steiner Determined to Build Better Shopping Center,” The Columbus Dispatch, June 9, 2002, 1E. 12 Melissa Levy, “On the Road Again,” Minneapolis Star Tribune, July 16, 2001, 1D. 13 Kowinski, The Malling of America, 26-52. 14 See Victor Gruen and Larry Smith, Shopping Towns USA: The Planning of Shopping Centers (New York: Reinhold, 1960). See also Witold Rybczynski, City Life (New York: Touch-stone, 1995), 206-207. 15 Some of the Mall of America’s promotional literature reads: “[The] Mall of America will be a city within a city, unlike other malls. … It will be divided into four distinctive city streets providing four unique shopping and visual environments.” Brief of Amicus Curiae from the Minnesota Civil Liberties Union, presented in the case State v. Wicklund.

166  PART I    Governance and Political Economy 16 Kowinski, The Malling of America, 233. 17 “Universal City Walk: An Architect’s Dream: A Conversation with Jon Jerde,” Universal City Press Release, 1993. Cited in Adia Hozic, Hollyworld: Space, Power and Fantasy in the American Economy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 6. 18 The term “imagineering” suggest “engineering and image” ala Disney. The term comes from Keally McBride, Social Imagineering, unpublished manuscript, 2002. 19 Jennifer Niles Coffin, “The United Mall of America: Free Speech, State Constitutions, and the Growing Fortess of Private Property,” University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform 33 Summer (2000), 615-649. 20 Craig Kellog, “Shopping and Housing Mix in New Kansas City Mall,” Architectural Record 187, no. 2 (1999), 56. 21 Garreau, Edge City. 22 Lechmere, Inc. v. NLRB 502 U.S. 526 (1992). 23 The mall is also protected by City of Bloomington police and the only police substation is located on mall property. For a more thorough discussion of this case see Coffin, “The United Mall of America.” 24 Mike Kaszuba, “Megamall Not Public Space, Court Rules,” Minneapolis Star Tribune, March 12, 1999, 1A. 25 Many other malls, including those operated by the Rouse Company (the developer of many visible projects such as Faneuil Hall in Boston), routinely provide a booth for community groups. See Witold Rybczynski, City Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), 209. 26 Anne Miller, “Mall Drops T-Shirt Charges,” The Times Union, March 6, 2003, B1. 27 Anne Miller, “Mall, Main Street Intersect in Debate; As Anti-War Voices Seek a Public Outlet, Private Property Issue Arise,” The Times Union, March 7, 2003, A1. 28 Benjamin Barber, “Malled, Mauled and Overhaulded: Arresting Suburban Sprawl by Transforming the Mall into the Usable Civic Space” in Public Space and Democracy, ed. Marcel Henaff and Tracy B. Strong (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 206. 29 See Jürgen Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, Vol 1, tr. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon, 1984); Jürgen Habermas, “What is Universal Pragmastics,” Communication and the Evolution of Society, tr. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon, 1979). For an excellent secondary source, see Simone Chambers, Reasonable Democracy: Jürgen Habermas and the Politics of Discourse (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univesity Press, 1996). 30 Molly j. Liskow, “Leafletting Rules to Balance Mall’s and Speakers’ Rights,” New Jersey Lawyer, August 28, 2000, BB. For the full text of the decision, see Green Party of New Jersey v. Hartz Mountain Industries, Inc., New Jersey Supreme Court, A-59, June 13, 2000. 31 Richard Briffault, “A Government for Our Time? Business Improvement Districts and Urban Governance,” Columbia Law Review 99 (March 1999), 365-477. 32 Kowinski, The Malling of America, 53-63. 33 See Arkansas Statue 14-184-115 (1995). Cited in Clayton P. Gillette and Paul B. Stephan 111, “Constitutional Limits on Privatization,” American Journal of Comparative Law 46 (1998). 34 Some BIDs, for example, those in New York, guarantee representation to non-property owners, but even there, business people, especially landlords,

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35

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dominate the membership of the governing boards. One study of eight BIDs in New York City found that 67% of members were business people; in the five remaining BIDs 75% of the board members were either business people or legal professionals. (Briffault, “A Government for Our Time?” 412.) Stephen C. Fehr, “Property Owners Commit to Revive D.C.: In Heart of District a $38.5 Million Push for Safety, Cleanliness,” The Washington Post, July 27, 1997, A20 (citing views of downtown business owners). Briffault, “A Government for Our Time?” 396. Paul Goldberger, “The Rise of the Private City,” in Breaking Away: The Future of Cities: Essays in Memory of Robert F. Wagner, ed. Julia Vitullo-Martin (New York: Twentieth Century Fund Press, 1996), 136-137. On festival marketplaces, see M. Christine Boyer, “Cities for Sale: Merchandising History at South Street Seaport,” in ed. Michael Sorkin, Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992), 1 81-204. Bernard Frieden and Lynne Sagalyn, Downtown, Inc.: How America Rebuilds Cities (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990). Tom Gallagher, “Trespasser on Main St.: (You!),” The Nation, December 18, 1995. Avery v. Midland County et al. 390 U.S. 474 (1968). The courts decided that local school board elections were not exempt from one-person, one-vote. In Salyer Land Co. v. Tulare Lake Basin Water Storage District, the Court determined that the water storage district, by virtue of its limited purpose and financing structure, could be governed by affected property owners exclusively. “Voting Scheme for Board Okayed,” City Law, November/December, 1998. A similar lawsuit was brought by homeless plaintiffs against the Fashion District BID in Los Angeles. The suit was settled out of court. Although the BID denied wrongdoing, it also promised that its security contractor, Burns International Security, would not search, harass, or order homeless people to “move along.” See Marla Dickerson, “Fashion District Group Agrees to Settle Homeless Lawsuit,” Los Angeles Times, August 14, 2001. “Homeless Workers: BIDs Failed to Pay Minimum Wage,” City Law, March/April 1998. The article reported that U.S. District Court Judge Sonia Sotomayor ruled that the program participants were entitled to the minimum wage. Heather Barr, “More Like Disneyland: State Action, 42 U.S.C. 1 1983, and Business Improvement Districts in New York,” Columbia Human Rights Law Review (Winter 1997), 399-404. The accuracy of these later accusations is a matter of controversy. At least one of the four workers retracted the accusations and another claimed that he was pressured to retract. The BID did settle at least two lawsuits by homeless people injured by outreach workers. Thomas Lueck, “Grand Central Partnership Is Subject of U.S. Inquiry,” New York Times, May 26, 1995, A7. Briffault, “A Government for Our Time?” 427-428. To cite one specific example, the Riverhead Business Improvement District successfully lobbied the town board to enact legislation requiring that any social service agency wanting to relocate in the district must get a special permit. See Mitchell Freedman, “Riverhead to Govern Downtown Tenants,” Newsday, May 9, 2002, A30.

168  PART I    Governance and Political Economy 49 Briffault, “A Government for Our Time?” 462-463. 50 Barr, “More Like Disneyland,” 404, 408-411. The statute quoted is 42 U.S.C. 1 1983. 51 Of course, a homeless person who was physically injured or whose property was destroyed could bring a criminal complaint or a civil suit for damages. The former is difficult, given how closely private security forces work with police (sometimes sharing a substation). The latter has been pursued successfully by homeless individuals. One plaintiff won a $27,500 judgment against the Grand Central Partnership. See David Stout, “For a Troubled Partnership: A History of Problems,” New York Times, November 8, 1995, B6. 52 Eds. Chuihua Judy Chung, Jeffrey Inaba, Rem Koolhaas, and Sze Tsung Leong, Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping (Cologne: Taschen, 2001).

9 Beyond Community and Sharing: The Case of Airbnb in New York City Katharina Knaus and Peer Illner

Introducing the Sharing Economy When looking at the contemporary urban fabric, it is apparent that cities are increasingly changed by new digital technologies. When travelling today, the highly mobile middle classes can choose between staying in a hotel or an Airbnb, among other choices. Rather than hailing a taxi, they turn on their phones, connect to the local 4G and call an Uber. Once comfortably settled in someone else’s living room, they sit back and order dinner on Deliveroo. As ubiquitous as these services are, they are currently still poorly understood. Who are the providers and the users of these services? What are its market mechanisms? Why are city governments increasingly concerned about regulating these growing online platforms? When talking about the future of urban service provision, one term has indelibly moved into the center of attention: the “sharing economy”, a selfdesignation used by a myriad of companies and organizations, especially since the Global Financial Crisis of 2008. There are different ways to define the “sharing economy.” What these companies have in common is the provision of an online platform to connect service and goods providers with consumers in order to facilitate exchange. Offers encompass a broad spectrum: spare rooms, cheap rides or small tasks

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such as repair work, to name just a few. Coherently defining the “sharing economy” and demarcating which companies and organizations fall inside its boundaries has proven complicated. Following sociologist Juliet Schor, “sharing economy” platforms can range from ‘non-profit’ to ‘for-profit’ and from ‘business-to-peer’ to ‘peer-to-peer’ models (Schor 2014, p. 4). Furthermore, most platforms provide online peer-to-peer feedback systems. One of the most widespread claims about the “sharing economy,” besides being eco-friendly and making use of underutilized assets, is that it gives more power to the people, facilitating trust and “disrupting” the centralized structures of the old economy. Academics and journalists have described this economic remodeling in various ways: as a part of “the rise of anti-capitalism” (Rifkin 2014), as “crowd-based-capitalism” (Sundararajan 2016), or as “platform-capitalism” (Lobo 2014). The latter puts emphasis on the re-emergence of venture capital funded companies, such as Airbnb, as powerful middlemen who significantly control access to and the processes of this business model (Lobo 2014).

Airbnb as Paradigm Airbnb is one of the “sharing economy’s” major players. It was founded in 2008 in San Francisco by the design graduates Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia and web developer Nathan Blecharczyk, as an online platform for users to list and book private accommodations for short- or long-term stays. Following Juliet Schor, it can be classified as a part of the for-profit and peer-to-peer part of the “sharing economy” (Schor 2014). As of November 2016, Airbnb features over 2 million listings in over 191 countries and is valued at $30 billion (Ting 2016). Airbnb is a primarily urban phenomenon. The home-rental platform has been flaunted as a democratizing tool that creates entrepreneurialism based on the sharing of expensive assets (such as housing) that have become even costlier to maintain since the 2008 economic crisis. Airbnb proclaims its service as a way for a community of sharers to supplement their dwindling income in times of recession and has actively and publicly promoted this stance in the media. What does this claim look like in reality? And what is behind Airbnb’s invocation of community in times of crisis? In the following section, we argue that rather than generating an association of sharers, the discourse on community building actually obscures a situation of informal and atomized users on the one hand, and commercial interests on the other. In this piece, we investigate the strategic use of the term in Airbnb’s recent lobbying efforts. We show that Airbnb’s rhetoric of grassroots sociality is part of a wider shift in business and urban policymaking that since the 1980s has drawn on participatory social practices to create a supposedly ‘ethical’ consumer environment. We examine this mechanism through a case study of Airbnb’s

170  PART I    Governance and Political Economy lobbying strategy in New York City that made extensive use of community building structures and rhetoric. Based on contemporary crisis theory, we argue that rather than being facilitated, the platform providers’ capacity to influence the “sharing economy’s” business model has actually become increasingly difficult. Drawing on recent empirical data of the use of Airbnb in New York City, we argue that more extensive quantitative and qualitative research is necessary to look past the rosy rhetoric of the “sharing economy” and develop a more nuanced picture of its socio-economic impact on the urban environment.

Crisis and Community First, let us note the apparent paradox at the heart of Airbnb’s claim. Historically, community formation and economic crises have not gone well together. Throughout the 20th century, a primary way in which community was understood was in the form of solidarity between workers, who could come together and campaign for improved conditions at their workplace. This form of community was primarily a phenomenon of economic boom rather than bust, of taut labor markets, rather than crisis. In the postwar years, the great expansion of factory production and worldwide infrastructures meant a high demand for labor, which swelled the ranks of the unions, creating ample political leverage for wage and benefit negotiations. The remarkable gains of mid-20th century worker organization were the 40-hour work week, as well as paid holidays, pensions and free health care and education (Przeworski 1985; Endnotes 2015). During the postwar years, workplace community building, expressed in union membership and workers’ clubs was part and parcel of being employed in the industrial economy. Then, in the 1960s, the productive economy in the United States ground to a halt with companies in major industrial cities such as Detroit and Newark laying off workers and downsizing production as early as 1960 (Clover 2016). Economists such as Robert Brenner (2006) and David McNally (2009) diagnose a “long downturn” and “world-slump” – setting in around 1960 and lasting until today – in which production is first moved offshore and then absolutely scaled back, resulting in skyrocketing unemployment. What were the immediate results of this crisis? For David McNally (2009), the favored tool in the attempt to resolve the crisis is financialisation, or the growth of financial tools and instruments, sold as bets on future profits in banking, insurance and, importantly for our case, in real estate. The net result is an increasingly volatile economic environment, whose explosiveness was dramatically experienced during the 2008 housing bubble. For McNally, financialisation presents a shift from real productive industries to increasingly fictitious capitals that culminate in factory closures, mass worker redundancies and layoffs across the globe.

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Since fictitious capital needs very little labor to function, the price of labor has been devalued at the same time as what Marx called the reserve army of labor, a growing surplus of workers who can be drafted in and out of employment at wish, has taken unprecedented dimensions. This is what the economist Loren Goldner (2007) captures when he speaks of a situation of capitalist self-cannibalization, since the investment into fictitious capital enables an enormous divestment of the means of basic social reproduction, resulting in mass unemployment, the concomitant increase in private debt, the privatization of education and health care and a public infrastructure left to rot. While capitalism has historically always been driven by crises, for Joshua Clover, “the current period is distinguished from similar passages in previous cycles to the extent that recoveries of the sort seen previously remain from our vantage point invisible” (2016, p. 130). The main thing for us to grasp is that in this environment there is increased competition around evermore scarce jobs, as the classical forums for self-determination between workers are becoming increasingly redundant. Indeed, in the face of this atomization of workers, some have argued that “by the end of the twentieth century, the concept of community has little use as an analytical category” (Pink et. al, 2016 p. 104). Instead, individualism reigns, in which every market actor will try to maximize his or her assets, including non-proprietary assets such as their rented apartments. If this is the context that the “sharing economy” inserts itself into, then Airbnb’s invocation of community has to be tested thoroughly. Let us now examine how the economic crisis played out in New York City.

New York City, Crisis, and Rent In New York City, deindustrialization has a long history that ranges roughly from 1920 to 1980 and which the emergence of the sharing economy appears to complete. Its pillars are the closure of the garment district and the New York port, which drove manufacture out of the city to gain office space for the finance, insurance and real estate sectors. In the words of cultural theorist Fredric Jameson: New York has undergone a massive restructuration in which 750,000 manufacturing jobs have disappeared, and in which the ratio of manufacturing to office work […] has been modified from 2:1 before the war to 1:2 today (2009, p. 167)

The immediate effect of this purging of production from the city was a tremendous rise in real estate prices, and consequently in rent. This is because rent prices are a perfect embodiment of fictitious capital whose value is speculatively determined as a bet on the future revenue from the types of

172  PART I    Governance and Political Economy work, carried out on the property (Harvey 1982). Since white collar office work yields much greater profits than manufacture, a simple change in land use can alter its value tremendously. Writing on what he calls the postindustrial “Assassination of New York”, Robert Fitch has outlined the profitability of de-industrializing the city and changing its land use: There is a nearly 1000 percent spread between the rent received for factory space and the rent landlords get for class A office space. Simply by changing the land use, one’s capital could increase in value many times. Presently, a long-term U.S. bond yields something on the order of 6 percent (1996, p. xii).

Continuing this line of thought to the present day, we can say there is another net capital gain to be made by renting not to long-term tenants (such as companies), but to tourists. In terms of its revenue, Airbnb does not compete with office space but with the hotel industry. Since hotels in New York City are notoriously expensive, undercutting their prices by a fraction will still yield a substantial gain. Colomb and Novy (2016) have outlined the effects of ‘touristifying’ the city, which they locate in a clear increase in rent. We can therefore speculate that today, tourism completes the operation that finance, insurance and real estate began in the 20th century. When posting a listing on Airbnb, prices can be set by hosts individually. Yet an algorithm provides a suggestion that is computed according to the properties and amenities of the apartment but also, importantly according to its location. Playing on the economic characteristics of rent pricing, the platform enables a monetary transaction without any trading of commodities, speculatively, in the same way that ground rent is determined. Airbnb thus repeats the primary economic mechanism of rent-pricing but inserts a second layer of rent onto the first one. In this way, Airbnb creates second-order rent. Strikingly, Airbnb’s business model has wholeheartedly accepted the reality of the economic crisis. It promotes itself as the ideal crisis tool, allowing people with a spare room (or entire apartment) to create a temporary sublet to supplement their dwindling incomes. Indeed, it has used the discourse of the crisis to launch a large lobbying campaign with the goal of advocating for new regulations to make homesharing for its so-called ‘community of hosts’ easier. Since 2010, Airbnb has implemented various lobbying strategies initially through an organization called Peers and different prominent lobbying firms and subsequently by mobilizing local host communities. The next section critically looks at Airbnb’s lobbying strategies in light of its efforts at community-building. We concentrate on the case study of New York City which is essentially a case of different actions and reactions, lobbying efforts and regulation measures and a complex interplay of different stakeholders. This relationship between Airbnb and New York City can be

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narrated in different ways, we take on a critical perspective by concentrating on Airbnb’s strategy, visualization and organization of its ‘community of hosts’ and outline the ways in which these have been contested.

The Strategy of Community To begin to understand Airbnb lobbying incentives, it is insightful to recapitulate the company’s involvement and positioning within the organization Peers. Peers was founded in 2013 and describes itself as members-led initiative that supports the movement of the “sharing economy” (Slee 2016, p. 21). Prior to its restructuring, it functioned as an advocacy platform for both the “sharing economy” companies as well as its providers and received part of its first funding by Airbnb. Douglas Atkin, Airbnb’s head of community and co-founder of Peers encouraged its members to organize and build a “social movement of sharers” (Schor 2014, p.10). Shortly after Peers was founded, Atkin gave a speech in London at the 2013 edition of the LeWeb conference to introduce the organization. He therein described Peers at as a new kind of union for a new kind of economy – as a movement for an economy that would distribute wealth, power and control that the old economy had centralized (Atkin 2013). He terminated his presentation with “vive la révolution” (Atkin 2013). Peers is an organization that combines a strong sense of communality with entrepreneurial self-interest (Slee 2016, p. 29) and calls on its members to become politically active advocates for regulation changes. Airbnb’s involvement in Peers brings to the fore one of the main lobbying strategies of the company that has since become more pronounced: establishing a rhetoric based on unity and encouraging its hosts to jointly advocate for a regulation change in favor of new sharing practices. This mixture between grassroots rhetoric and Silicon Valley capitalism can be seen as the continuation of what Barbrook and Cameron in 1995 termed the Californian Ideology, an amalgamation of the “cultural bohemianism of San Francisco with the hi-tech industries of Silicon Valley” (Barbrook/Cameron 1995). Today, we can sharpen this observation by drawing attention to the fact that “sharing economy” companies are co-opting activist rhetoric, promoting the idea of a community to advocate for deregulation of new economic markets.

Visualizing the Community Airbnb’s strategy of creating a ‘community of hosts’ was pursued in summer 2014 when New Yorkers woke up to find the Subway stations plastered with new advertisements stating: New Yorkers Agree: Airbnb is Good for New York City. The pictures on the advertisements displayed hosts in New York

174  PART I    Governance and Political Economy City that profited from Airbnb and were able to sustain themselves through the extra income. In general, the advertising campaign portrayed the company as a “valuable community service” (Bellafante 2014) that was beneficial for local neighborhoods, a service that helps people who face eviction to save their homes, as well as a tool that builds familiarity between hosts and guests.

Contesting the Community In 2014, Airbnb experienced exponential growth, which subsequently generated much concern. The New York City advertising campaign was largely a reaction to an emerging legal battle headed by the New York Attorney General, Eric T. Schneiderman, who served Airbnb with a subpoena for data on their ‘host community’ to track the way the platform was being used. It was the beginning of a debate that shifted from anecdotal evidence to facts. In spring 2014, Airbnb handed over anonymized data that led to an official data report entitled Airbnb in the city. As stated in the introduction of the publication that was published in October 2014, “until now, the discourse has centered more on opinions and anecdotes than facts. This report seeks to bridge the gulf between rhetoric and reality” (Schneiderman 2014, p. 2). Key findings of the report concluded that private short-term bookings on Airbnb have grown sharply within the review period (January 1, 2010 through June 2, 2014) and that the revenue to Airbnb and its hosts nearly doubled every year (Schneiderman 2014, p. 6-7). Furthermore, the report elaborated that 72% of unique units rented through Airbnb violate state or city law and only a small percentage of commercial users (users who manage more than two listings) are present on site. Nevertheless, these 6 % of hosts generate a disproportionate amount of revenue and reservations, with a single user administering up to 272 unique units, running a multimillion dollar business (Schneiderman 2014, p. 8-10). Furthermore, in 2013, more than 4600 units showed a high-booking availability for three months a year (or more), with nearly 2000 of them being booked a total of half a year (or more), consequently being unavailable as long-term rentals (Schneiderman 2014, p.  3). The report confirmed the tangible effects on urban neighborhoods and everyday life that generated concerns of longterm living space being taken off of the market, of the touristification of urban neighborhoods and of residents living next to a revolving door of strangers. Backing up these concerns with factual evidence led to the gradual formation of an anti-Airbnb coalition that brought together various and disparate stakeholders. A prominent opposition coalition that united in September 2014 is a group called Share Better, which consists of local residents, elected official (various state senators and city council members) and community activists. Although having established its base in New York, the group currently

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operates nationwide, drawing attention to the fact that “Airbnb exacerbates the housing crises in densely populated cities all over the world, contributes to rising rents, and poses serious public safety concerns for guests, hosts and neighbors” (ShareBetter 2016). To raise awareness for these issues, they featured “horror stories,” parody videos and critical press reports, to tell the story of how Airbnb is harming cities and local neighborhoods and how its distinct technological interface is creating new problems such as issues of racial discrimination (ShareBetter 2016). Furthermore, they have also taken up political lobbying efforts that were largely funded by the New York Hotel and Motel Trade Council (Stulberg 2016). Generally speaking, the controversies of Airbnb’s mode of operation has united a unique coalition of both “Democrats and Republicans, landlords and tenants, affordable housing advocates, real estate developers and unions” (Benner 2016), fighting Airbnb’s illegal operation. The “war” on Airbnb (Plautz 2014; Pressler 2014) was also the inducement for protracted New York City council hearings in January 2015 and October 2015, which mainly focused on the issue of accurate data accessibility and future regulation.

Organizing the Community In the wake and aftermath of these hearings, Airbnb implemented its current lobbying strategy that is thoroughly based on community building rhetoric. In November 2015 Airbnb published the so called Community Compact on their webpage AirbnbAction. This document sums up the company’s visions on home-sharing and proclaimed efforts to operate transparently in cities where Airbnb communities have a strong presence. It was published shortly after Chris Lehane joined the company as Head of Global Policy and Public Affairs. The lawyer and former member of the Bill Clinton advisory team soon became the face leading their “movement” and, according to the company, is responsible for helping to “organize our hosts and ensure their voices are heard loud and clear by policymakers who are learning more about Airbnb” (AirbnbAction 2015a). One of Lehane’s first official duties was to support and oversee the creation of Home Sharing Clubs as a sort of grassroots initiative to fight regulation. The clubs are planned to be independently managed but can be supported with expertise and guidance by Airbnb (Steinmetz 2015). Airbnb on their website explain that in order to support the creation of these Home Sharing Clubs the company will: “ - Give our community the freedom to do what works for them. We will provide host clubs with support and information, but these organizations will be independent and free to make their own decisions. - Give our community access to the finest grassroots organizing training, tools and support. We’ve worked closely with former Obama

176  PART I    Governance and Political Economy Administration officials and organizing experts. Now, we’ll make these experts available to the Airbnb community. - Provide dedicated Airbnb staff to help our community. Our team in San Francisco will be available to our community and offer advice and support to hosts and guests who are organizing in communities around the world. (AirbnbAction 2015b)”

The mobilization of the host community and the support of Home Sharing Clubs that aim at creating shared interests between home-sharers was also the main strategy employed in fighting a bill that was first passed by the The New York State Assembly Housing Committee in May 2016. It foresaw to toughen the New York 2010 Multiple Dwelling Law that renders it illegal to rent out a Class A Multi-Dwelling building for less than 30 days without the owner/resident present, by introducing severe fines for advertising illegal units online or offline. The planned enforcement was a reaction to the rapid growth of Airbnb listing throughout the city that mainly consisted of entire units with high availability (Cox 2016) as well as Airbnb’s unintelligible mode of operation. It was signed into law by Governor Andrew Cuomo at the end of October 2016—with the time leading up to the decision serving as a hotbed for lobbying efforts. One of the strategies that Airbnb employed was the mobilization of its ‘community of hosts’ by organizing, coordinating and financing a lobbying trip to Albany for hosts to talk to politicians about their hosting experiences. Furthermore, Airbnb worked on giving its community a face by displaying online video portraits of hosts telling their story and inviting council members into their homes. One example is Linda from Flushing, who, through hosting, gets to spend “quality time” with her kids and maintain her house (AirbnbAction 2016a), or Lee from Ozone-Park, who manages to pay his medical bills through hosting income (AirbnbAction 2016b). Airbnb’s aim is therefore to unite its hosts as a constituency (Kessler 2016) to further promote the company’s core argument: Airbnb helps middle class New Yorkers to make ends meet.

Integrating the Community Let us take a step back and place Airbnb’s engagement with its hosts and use of grassroots structures and rhetoric into its historical context. Rather than being entirely novel, these “pro-social” practices indicate what happened to the tried and tested idea of community solidarity in the age of deindustrialization. As the working class dissolved as an identifiable class, giving way to a mixed array of white collar workers, freelancers, homeworkers and informal employees, so did its traditional organisations, such as large labor unions and mass political parties. Furthermore, the ethos of participatory decision-making and pooling of

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capacities and resources that had characterized these worker organisations was adopted as a new, “humane” and accessible model for corporate management. Paradigmatically referred to as the “New Spirit of Capitalism” by the sociologists Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello (2005), this model, which Silicon Valley can be seen to perfect, champions horizontal hierarchies, employee flexibility and most importantly stakeholder participation as its hallmarks. Since the 1970s, grassroots community organizing has thus become absorbed into a new style of management, which, rather than solidarity, understood as the possibility for critical political leverage vis à vis the employer, attempts to create a feedback loop between employer and employee through performance reviews, bottom-up assessment sessions and the participatory inclusion of workers. This shift saw a strong valorization of aspirational employee engagement as a means to hold on to the promises of upward mobility and social integration that had been the pillars of the industrial era of full employment. In response to their crumbling, community leaders, entrepreneurs and local politicians all embraced an aspirational ethos of collaboration and horizontal integration. Often this took the form of social activists forming alliances with politicians, business leaders or real estate developers (Arena 2012). On the side of governments and big business, this willingness to participate in corporate reform was complimented by an active inclusion of local activists by the political and financial elite. Business leaders emphasized the importance of integrating the nonprofit sector and important interest groups from the 1960s and 1970s in order to tackle new challenges in an unbureaucratic way (Cisneros/Engdahl 2009). These wider shifts in business and policymaking enable us to make sense of, Airbnb’s effort to integrate community-building and to critically assess the dynamics between the platforms and the users of the “sharing economy”. In an article on community networks in nonprofit organisations, John McNutt and Katherine Boland describe the practice of using activist structures for business gains as astroturfing: “Astroturf, quite simply, is synthetic grassroots organizing created for manipulative political purposes (see Lyon & Maxwell, 2004; Allen, 1998; Austin, 2002). In this type of activity, an entity that wishes to affect public policy creates an effort that gives the appearance of grassroots support. Using public relations methodology (audience analysis, news media, advertising and so forth), Astroturf simulates mobilization by a legitimate local organization. When done well, Astroturf efforts can look very much like the efforts that they are intended to replicate.” (2007, p. 167)

When considering Airbnb’s encouragements of Home Sharing Clubs through financial support (e.g. the financing of lobbying trips), training and organizing

178  PART I    Governance and Political Economy workshops, we must assume the company is rolling out the lawn for its own ‘movement’ to take place on. Astroturfing highlights the involvement and co-option of activist rhetoric and puts emphasis on another possible corporate intention, namely that “(…) a front group is created to mask the true identities and interests being represented.” (McNutt/ Boland 2007, p. 168). In the case of Airbnb’s host mobilization, this ultimately leads back to the pressing question of how Airbnb’s poster child hosts are representative of the predominant use of the platform. Considering Airbnb’s community building efforts as astroturfing enables us to look past the rosy rhetoric and to develop a more nuanced understanding of the current ways in which the platform is being used. This question leads us to the existing data reports on the matter.

Quantifying the Community Indeed, the question of capturing host activity on the site has been addressed by Airbnb’s Community Compact that has announced the publication of “Home-Sharing Activity Reports” on an annual basis. According to Airbnb, these will include: “The total annual economic activity generated by the Airbnb community, the amount of income earned by a typical Airbnb host, the geographic distribution of Airbnb listings, the number of hosts who avoided eviction or foreclosure by sharing their home on Airbnb, the percentage of Airbnb hosts who are sharing their permanent home, the number of days a typical listing is rented on Airbnb, the total number of Airbnb guests who visited a city, the average number of guests per listing by city, the average number of days the average guest stayed in a city and the safety record of Airbnb listings.” (AirbnbAction 2015).

Murray Cox, who runs the watchdog platform Inside Airbnb has heavily criticized this effort of Airbnb for only showing Airbnb’s positive effects and for not mentioning the illegal listings or issues of displacement. Furthermore, hosting education measures are seen by Cox as efforts to discard any sense of responsibility on the platform’s behalf (Cox 2015). The first Community Compact data report of Airbnb in New York City proved the importance of independent data investigation, as it emerged that the report had been deliberately manipulated to give a sense of false transparency. It was released on December 1, 2015 and made available “more than 170,000 rows of data, of about almost 60,000 listing in New York” (AirbnbAction 2015c). According to Airbnb, it “includes anonymized information about every active Airbnb listing in New York as of November 17, 2015, as well as information about every listing in New York City that hosted a trip in the past year.” (AirbnbAction 2015c). It therefore

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displays a one-day snapshot of “typical” host activity, as well as highlighting developments from November 1, 2014 until November 1, 2015. The data was only partly made available online and the whole report was only accessible to journalists on request within the office of Airbnb (Popper 2015). Two major findings are noteworthy: The report highlighted that 99% of entire home properties, available through the platform are offered by hosts with only one or two listings. However, the report also underlined that the 1% of hosts offering more than two entire home bookings take home 24% of the revenue earned by hosts renting out entire homes (AirbnbAction 2015c). This supports the assumption that a small proportion of commercial players are operating multimillion dollar businesses and presumably more hosts do so as well, particularly those who have listings under names other than their own (Popper 2015). In the following months, the data Airbnb provided was investigated by Murray Cox and technology writer Tom Slee who revealed their spectacular findings in February 2016. Cox and Slee were able to show that Airbnb had removed 1000 entire-apartment listings from its site in the days leading up to November 17, 2015. The percentage of multiple listings therefore dropped from 18.6% on November 1, 2015 to 10.3% on November 20, 2015 (subsequently, it started rising again). In their report, Airbnb presented this date as “a typical day in the company’s operations and misrepresented the one-time purge as a historical trend” (Slee/Cox 2016). Coming back to the Airbnb’s community building efforts, one must take into consideration if Airbnb’s promoted “community of hosts” are in fact covering for commercial users that generate a disproportionate amount of profit. Considering the future development of the platform, it is important to look past the narrative the company is promoting and to critically look at the quantity and quality of the listings to gauge their usage. Especially in the aftermath of the current law enforcement, independent data collection is essential.

Conclusion: A Plea for more Qualitative and Quantitative Data As the contextualization of Airbnb’s current lobbying strategies has shown, community building efforts and Airbnb’s marketing rhetoric must be critically investigated. Furthermore, independent data generation on platform-activity must be promoted if one is to gain an unbiased insight into the workings of the “sharing economy”. Although Airbnb has increased the provision of host activity data and has continued to monitor listings that do not comply with their new one host one home strategy, InsideAirbnb.com creator Murray Cox reminds us that

180  PART I    Governance and Political Economy “Airbnb’s business model incentivizes commercial use, regardless of whether it is one host that permanently rents multiple homes, or many hosts that permanently rent one entire home.” (Cox 2016a). Adding data to the debate also permits to focus on another notion of community, namely that of local neighborhood communities, that are also being shaped and influenced by an intensified use of Airbnb. Regarding qualitative research, the question of how hosts themselves can challenge the co-option dynamics of astroturfing becomes important. Whilst Airbnb is promoting community building and is supporting Home Sharing Clubs, its community of hosts can develop their own agendas and claims (Schor 2014, p. 10-11). Airbnb hosts may for instance demand the company to take on more responsibility for monitoring commercial misuse, by reconsidering the architecture of its digital interface. Furthermore, service providers in the “sharing economy” in general may advocate for an independent administration of their ratings and profile or even take over the complete ownership of platforms. Trebor Scholz and Nathan Schneider have become well-known advocates for the movement called platform cooperativism, proposing platforms to be collectively owned and democratically governed (Scholz/Schneider 2016). On November 8th, 2016, Airbnb has renamed its webpage AirbnbAction into AirbnbCitizen. Without providing a concrete definition of their understanding of citizen, the website explains “Building on the foundation of AirbnbAction.com, Citizen remains a tool for advocacy but is now a more expansive site for the growing home sharing movement, offering resources for staying informed and taking action.” (AirbnbCitizen 2016)

Who is the citizen of the future, envisioned by Airbnb? How is this vision translated into reality and how does this influence urban development? While our discussion of Airbnb has highlighted the novelty of the “sharing economy” and its emergent political battles, it is striking to note the resurfacing of classical political antagonisms unfolding on the back of Airbnb. On the one hand, these are antagonisms between monopoly corporations and public regulators. On the other hand, we witness new and interesting forms of political engagement among the platform providers. Be it in the form of platform cooperativism or the demand for increased user remuneration (Gregory 2016), the “sharing economy” has become the terrain of fairly classical worker struggles for increased political influence. Rather than the increasing atomization and separation of workers in the era of crisis, there are thus germinal forms of solidarity that are struggling to find ways to leverage power. Just like in industrial times, the power of

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the corporation is certainly much larger than that of organized labor. The question is thus one of winning concessions and finding ways to multiply one’s influence by working together. It is thus not within the rose-tinted rhetoric of “community sharing,” but rather in the arena of actually-existing provider and platform antagonisms that the future of urban citizenship will be negotiated.

References AirbnbAction. 2015. “Airbnb-Community-Compact.pdf.” https://www.airbnbaction. com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/Airbnb-Community-Compact.pdf. ———. 2015a. “Welcome, Chris Lehane.” Accessed November 20. https://www. airbnbcitizen.com/welcome-chris-lehane/. ———. 2015b. “Organizing in 100 Cities: The Airbnb Host Movement.” Accessed November 20. https://san-francisco.airbnbcitizen.com/organizing-in-100-cities-theairbnb-host-movement/. ———. 2015c. “Data on the Airbnb Community in NYC.” Accessed November 20. https://new-york-city.airbnbcitizen.com/economic-impact-reports/data-on-theairbnb-community-in-nyc/. ———. 2016a. “New York: Linda’s Airbnb Story.” Accessed November 20. https:// new-york-city.airbnbcitizen.com/stories/new-york-hosting-is-keeping-lindas-familyin-their-home/. ———. 2016b. “New York: Lee’s Airbnb Story.” Accessed November 20. https:// new-york-city.airbnbcitizen.com/stories/new-york-lees-airbnb-story/. AirbnbCitizen. 2016. “Meet Airbnb Citizen.” Accessed November 20. https://www. airbnbcitizen.com/meet-airbnb-citizen/. Arena, John. 2012. Driven from New Orleans: how nonprofits betray public housing and promote privatization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Barbrook, Richard, and Andy Cameron. 1995. “THE CALIFORNIAN IDEOLOGY by Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron | Imaginary Futures.” The HRC Archive. http:// www.imaginaryfutures.net/2007/04/17/the-californian-ideology-2/. Bellafante, Ginia. 2014. “Airbnb’s Promise: Every Man and Woman a Hotelier.” The New York Times, July 3. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/06/nyregion/airbnbs-promiseevery-man-and-woman-a-hotelier.html. Benner, Katie. 2016. “Airbnb in Disputes With New York and San Francisco.” The New York Times, June 28. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/29/technology/airbnb-suessan-francisco-over-a-law-it-had-helped-pass.html. Boltanski, L., and E. Chiapello. 2005. The New Spirit of Capitalism. London; New York: Verso. Brenner, Robert. 2006. The economics of global turbulence: the advanced capitalist economies from long boom to long downturn, 1945-2005. London; New York: Verso. Cisneros, Henry, and Lora Engdahl. 2009. From despair to hope, HOPE VI and the new promise of public housing in America’s cities. Washington, D.C: Brookings Institution Press.

182  PART I    Governance and Political Economy Clover, Joshua. 2016. Riot. Strike. Riot.: the new era of uprisings. London: New York: Verso. Colomb, C., and J. Novy. 2016. Protest and Resistance in the Tourist City, Contemporary Geographies of Leisure, Tourism and Mobility. Abingdon, Oxon: Taylor & Francis. Cox, Murray. 2015. “Facebook Post.” Facebook. November 12 2015. https://m.facebook. com/insideairbnb/posts/1514463132184815. Cox, Murray. 2016. “Inside Airbnb: New York City. Adding Data to the Debate.” Inside Airbnb. Accessed November 20. http://insideairbnb.com. Cox, Murray. 2016a. “NYC: Battle Against Airbnb Hosts with Multiple Entire Home Listings Won, but the War Against Commercial Listings Continues – Inside Airbnb. Adding Data to the Debate.” Inside Airbnb. Accessed November 20. http://insideairbnb. com/nyc-the-war-against-commercial-listings-continues/. Dudas, Mike. 2013. “Employee Data Portability in the Marketplace Economy.” Just Dudas. December 29. https://mikedudas.com/2013/12/29/employee-data-portabilityin-the-marketplace-economy/. Endnotes. 2015. “A History of Separation.” Endnotes 4 (4):70-194. Fitch, R. 1996. The Assassination of New York. New York: Open Road Media. Goldner, Loren. 2007. “Fictitious Capital for Beginners: Imperialism, Anti-Imperialism and the Continuing Relevance of Rosa Luxemburg.” accessed 17.2.2016. http:// www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/fictitious-capital-beginners-imperialism-antiimperialism-and-continuing-relevance-rosa-luxemburg. Gregory, Karen. 2016. “Weird Solidarities.” accessed 16.10.2016. http://dismagazine. com/discussion/72958/karen-gregory-weird-solidarities/. Harvey, David. 1982. The Limits to Capital. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Jameson, F. 1998. The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983-1998. London; New York: Verso. Kaysen, Ronda. 2014. “Airbnb and Rent Regulation Will Be Hot Topics.” The New York Times, December 26. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/28/realestate/new-yorkairbnb-and-rent-regulation-will-be-hot-topics.html. Kessler, Sarah. 2016. “How Airbnb Turned Its Hosts Into Political Foot Soldiers.” Fast Company. May 20. https://www.fastcompany.com/3059975/how-airbnb-turned-itshosts-into-political-foot-soldiers. LeWeb. 2013. Douglas Atkin - Airbnb - LeWeb London 2013. https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=cp2Hlp2TP-M. Lobo, Sascha. 2014. “S.P.O.N. - Die Mensch-Maschine: Auf Dem Weg in Die Dumpinghölle.” SPIEGEL ONLINE. September 3. http://www.spiegel.de/ netzwelt/netzpolitik/sascha-lobo-sharing-economy-wie-bei-uber-ist-plattformkapitalismus-a-989584.html. McNally, David. 2009. “From Financial Crisis to World-Slump: Accumulation, Financialisation, and the Global Slowdown.” Historical Materialism 17 (2):35-83. doi: 10.1163/156920609X436117. Mcnutt, John, and Katherine Boland. 2007. “Astroturf, Technology and the Future of Community Mobilization: Implications for Nonprofit Theory.” In Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare Vol. 34 (No. 3): 165–78.

Chapter 3   Public Power and Private Influence in Contemporary Cities   183 Pink, Sarah, Heather A. Horst, John Postill, Larissa Hjorth, Tania Lewis, and Jo Tacchi, eds. 2016. Digital Ethnography: Principles and Practice. First published. Los Angeles; London; New Delhi ; Singapore ; Washington DC: Sage. Plautz, Jessica. 2014. “This Is War: New York Coalition Launches Campaign Against Airbnb.” Mashable. September 12. http://mashable.com/2014/09/12/new-yorkairbnb-war/#HyDmFVyXskqL. Popper, Ben. 2015. “Airbnb’s Worst Problems Are Confirmed by Its Own Data.” The Verge. December 4. http://www.theverge.com/2015/12/4/9849242/airbnb-data-newyork-affordable-housing-illegal-hotels. Pressler, Jessica. 2014. “The War Over Airbnb in New York Gets Personal.” New York Magazine. September 23. http://nymag.com/news/features/airbnb-in-new-yorkdebate-2014-9/. Przeworski, A. 1985. Capitalism and Social Democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rifkin, Jeremy. 2014. “The Rise of Anti-Capitalism.” The New York Times, March 15. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/16/opinion/sunday/the-rise-of-anti-capitalism. html. ShareBetter. 2016. “ShareBetter.” ShareBetter. Accessed November 20. http://www. sharebetter.org/. Scheiderman, Eric T. 2014. “Airbnb in the City.” Data Report. Office of New York State Attorney General. http://www.ag.ny.gov/pdfs/Airbnb%20report.pdf. Scholz, Trebor, and Schneider, Nathan, eds. 2016. Ours to Hack and to Own, the Rise of Platform Cooperativism, a New Vision for the Future of Work and a Fairer Internet. New York: OR Books. Schor, Juliet. 2014. “Debating the Sharing Economy.” Great Transition Initiative. http:// www.tellus.org/pub/Schor_Debating_the_Sharing_Economy.pdf. Slee, Tom. 2016. Deins ist meins. Die unbequemen Wahrheiten der Sharing Economy. 1st ed. München: Verlag Antje Kunstmann GmbH. Slee, Tom in Hugill, David. 2016a. “The Sharing Economy Blues - Tom Slee on Silicon Valley’s Anti-Regulation Revolution.” Canadian Dimension. Accessed November 20. https://canadiandimension.com/articles/view/the-sharing-economy-blues. Slee, Tom, and Cox, Murray. 2016. “How Airbnb Hid the Facts in New York City – Inside Airbnb. Adding Data to the Debate.” Inside Airbnb. Accessed November 20. http://insideairbnb.com/how-airbnb-hid-the-facts-in-nyc/. Steinmetz, Katy. 2015. “How Airbnb Plans to Become a Worldwide Political Organizer | TIME.” TIME. November 4. http://time.com/4100296/airbnb-san-franciscoproposition-f/. Stulberg, Ariel. 2016. “Hotel-Funded Anti-Airbnb Group Making Inroads at City Hall.” The Real Deal New York. May 10. http://therealdeal.com/2016/05/10/hotel-fundedanti-airbnb-group-making-inroads-at-city-hall/. Sundararajan, Arun. 2016. The Sharing Economy: The End of Employment and the Rise of Crowd-Based Capitalism. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. Ting, Deanna. 2016. “Airbnb’s Latest Investment Values It as Much as Hilton and Hyatt Combined.” Skift. September 23. https://skift.com/2016/09/23/airbnbs-latestinvestment-values-it-as-much-as-hilton-and-hyatt-combined/.

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10 What Are Charter Schools and Do They Deliver? Jon Valant † Charter schools are tuition-free, publicly funded schools. Charter school leaders accept greater accountability in exchange for greater autonomy. About 3 million students attend charter schools across 43 states and the District of Columbia. Assessing whether charter schools work is a complicated question. While the last four U.S. presidents—Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Trump—all expressed support for charter schools, support is splintering along party lines. • About 3 million students attend charter schools across 43 states and the District of Columbia. • Compared to traditional public schools, a disproportionate share of charter school students are Hispanic (33%) or Black (26%). • Assessing whether charter schools work is difficult because doing so requires clarity about their goals and good measures of how well they achieve those goals.

What Is a Charter School? Traditionally, local school districts operate public schools. They make decisions about how schools run, in some cases through collective bargaining agreements with teachers unions. Most students are assigned to traditional public schools based on the neighborhood in which they live. Charter schools operate differently. A charter school begins with an application that describes the proposed school’s mission, curriculum, management structure, finances, and other characteristics. That proposal goes to a government-approved authorizing agency such as a school district or a university. Who can serve as an authorizer—like many aspects of charter school law—varies from state to state. If the authorizer approves the proposal, it creates a contract (“charter”) with the school’s governing board that describes the school’s rights, responsibilities, and performance † Source: Brookings Governance Studies, ‘What are charter schools and do they deliver?’ by Jon Valant, October 15th 2019. Originally published on brookings.edu. https://www. brookings.edu/policy2020/votervital/what-are-charter-schools-and-do-they-deliver/

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expectations. This is the core of what has been called the “charter school bargain.” School leaders accept greater accountability (e.g., the possibility of closure for poor performance) in exchange for greater autonomy (e.g., the ability to pursue a specialized theme). Along with accountability and autonomy, the other principle at the foundation of the charter school model is choice. Students are not assigned to charter schools based on where they live. Instead, their families request a seat in the school. Some cities use unified enrollment systems that allow families to request many schools at once, ranked in order of preference, and then assign students to schools using a placement algorithm. The principles of accountability, autonomy, and choice are interconnected. For example, choice serves as a form of market accountability (since schools must attract families to stay open), while school leaders can use their autonomy to differentiate themselves and create a rich assortment of choices for families.

Why Are Charter Schools Controversial? Since their formative days in the early 1990s, charter schools have drawn support from unusual political coalitions, with different groups seeing different opportunities. Many conservatives like the market competition and limited government control. Many progressives like that all families, not just the wealthy, get to choose their children’s schools. Even some union leaders saw early promise in charter schools as a way to give teachers more voice in how schools run. In fact, the last four U.S. presidents—Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Trump—all expressed support. However, the politics of charters are changing. Teachers unions have long been charter schools’ most powerful opponents—they are skeptical that charter school teachers actually have more control and frustrated that only 11% of charter schools employ unionized teachers. More generally, support is splintering along party lines as Democrats—especially white progressives—have become increasingly opposed. Some of this polarization predates the Trump administration. For example, many prominent Democrats, including Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, opposed a 2016 Massachusetts referendum to allow more charter schools (a referendum that was soundly defeated). However, the emergence of President Trump and Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos as the most prominent charter school supporters has accelerated the polarization in public opinion. The specific critiques of charter schools vary. For example, some dislike that charter schools attract public funding (and students) that otherwise would have gone to traditional public schools. Others dislike that for-profit education management organizations can operate charter schools in some

186  PART I    Governance and Political Economy states (about 12% of charter schools had this status in 2016-17, according to the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools). Others worry about a lack of transparency or public control—or that charters haven’t lived up to their promise.

Who Attends Charter Schools? Despite the attention these schools get, only about 6% of U.S. public school students attended a charter school in 2016-17. As illustrated by the light blue line in the figure below, this percentage has increased since the turn of the century, although the rate of growth appears to be tapering off. Notably, a disproportionate share of charter school students are either Hispanic (33% of all charter students) or Black (26%). More than 10% of Black public school students and 7% of Hispanic public school students attended a charter school in 2016-17, compared to about 4% of white students. This partly reflects the fact that a much larger share of charter schools (57%) than traditional public schools (25%) are operating in cities. In many cities, including Detroit and Washington, D.C., a majority or near-majority of public school students attend a charter school. At the extreme end of the spectrum, New Orleans has an all-charter public school system. All students

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FIGURE 1  Percentage of U.S. Public School Students in Charter Schools by School Year and Race/Ethnicity Source: Author’s calculations using data from U.S. Department of Education National Center for Educational Statistics (Public Elementary/Secondary School Universe Study)

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Do Charter Schools Work? Assessing whether charter schools work requires clarity about their goals and good measures of how well they achieve those goals. It is not clear that we have either. The most commonly reported studies compare students’ academic performance in charter versus non-charter schools. These comparisons are methodologically challenging, since charter school students differ from other public school students in ways that could affect their performance. Researchers need to find reasonable comparison groups. One approach is to examine the random lotteries often used when a school receives more applicants than it can accommodate. Researchers tend to find that lottery winners perform much better than lottery losers, but these comparisons come with major caveats. Only schools with excess demand conduct lotteries, and it’s no surprise that students who get into the most sought-after schools perform well. The Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) at Stanford University has taken a different approach. CREDO obtains student-level data from many states and districts and then matches charter school students with traditional public school students who appear similar in many ways (e.g., students of the same race, gender, and poverty status, with similar prior test scores, who previously attended the same schools). Then they compare charter students’ test scores with the scores of their matched non-charter pairs. This method isn’t foolproof—for example, the variables used for matching could miss something important—but it is probably the best approach to date for charter/non-charter comparisons that represent the broad population of charter schools. The figure below shows some notable results from the CREDO studies. The key takeaway is that charter school students, in general, perform about the same as their matched peers in the traditional public schools, but there is variation across different types of schools and groups of students. For example, students in urban charter schools generally perform better than their matched pairs—likely for an assortment of reasons—while students in online charter schools perform much worse. However, we should consider whether a charters versus traditional public schools comparison is the right measure in the first place. Part of the rationale for charter schools is that they should generate innovation and competitive pressure that improve charter and non-charter schools alike. If those improvements occur—and there is some evidence for this—these comparisons might understate the benefits of charter schools. If charter schools harm traditional public schools by, for example, reducing funding or creating funding uncertainty—and there is some evidence for this, too—these comparisons might understate the costs of charter schools.

188  PART I    Governance and Political Economy Charter schools perform better Overall (all charters) - Math Overall (all charters) - Reading

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FIGURE 2  Charter School Performance Compared to Matched Traditional Public Schools (CREDO Studies) Source: Data on all charters from CREDO’s 2013 National School Study. Data on urban charters from CREDO’s 2015 Urban Charter School Study Report on 41 Regions. Data on online charters from CREDO’s 2015 Online Charter School Study.

Regardless, test score comparisons paint an incomplete picture of charter school performance. We care about a much broader set of outcomes, including how charter schools affect racial segregation, to what extent they create options for disadvantaged families, and whether they are truly producing innovative school models. The related research is too expansive for this overview but summarized nicely in a 2015 NBER report.1

What Can Policymakers Do at the Federal Level? When presidential candidates talk about charter schools, it is more about politics and principle than policy, since education is largely left to the states. However, the federal government plays a role. For example, the U.S. Department of Education administers the Charter Schools Program (CSP), which provides funds to assist with matters such as charter school start-up, facilities acquisition, and replication. Congress allotted $440 million for the CSP in FY 2019—a figure that has increased substantially during the Trump administration. Federal policymakers could increase or decrease overall funding and add or remove stipulations for that funding (e.g., keeping federal funds from reaching for-profit charter schools). State and local policymakers regularly make consequential decisions about charter schools. These decisions cover a wide range of issues, including funding formulas, caps on the number of schools or seats allowed,

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determinations of which schools (or types of schools) to open, rules about which students get priority access to high-demand schools, and requirements for open meetings and records.

Note 1 Dennis Epple, Richard Romano, Ron Zimmer. 2015. “Charter Schools: A Survey of Research on Their Characteristics and Effectiveness.” National Bureau of Economic Research. https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w21256/w21256.pdf

PART II The Challenges of Governing the Divided Metropolis

CHAPTER 4 Governing Factional Polities in America’s Urban Centers Editors’ Introduction America’s urban centers are hotbeds of contestation in almost every policy area. They also represent microcosms of negotiation, conflict, collaboration, and compromise between different religious, political, cultural, national, ethnic, and racial groups. Cities are also central to the country’s ongoing political debate on immigration. Despite the fact that many more recent migrants are bypassing the country’s big cities in favor of new destinations in more rural and suburban areas, many of them still concentrate in cities. Here, they negotiate and defend their place in society, along with some of the country’s other historically marginalized groups. In the process, cities can become critical arenas for activism, sometimes unlikely alliances, longtime developments, and overall battles for rights and equality. In Selection 11, Els de Graauw examines San Francisco as a microcosm of immigrant activism. San Francisco represents an interesting case study due to its relative diversity among immigrant groups, its location in one of the primary immigrant-receiving states, California, and the city’s complicated and dynamic institutional framework. Since the city of San Francisco recently moved from a system of at-large representation to district-based representation, immigrant nonprofits have had to change their ways of operation in lobbying for government support. The city’s hyperpluralist organizational framework, and its increasingly pro-business attitude made it difficult for these immigrant nonprofits to lobby for

DOI: 10.4324/9781315163635-6193

194  PART II   The Challenges of Governing the Divided Metropolis social support for immigrants. The challenges faced by undocumented immigrants in particular remain high on the political agenda of urban immigrant nonprofits, especially since larger cities, like San Francisco, have taken the lead in the sanctuary movement. Sanctuary cities (and states, like California, which declared itself a sanctuary in 2018) attempt to protect undocumented immigrants by allowing them to enjoy certain privileges (such as obtaining a local or state ID, for instance) and refusing to collaborate with federal authorities, such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in their efforts to deport undocumented immigrants. However, immigration policy is a federal issue and there are serious limits to states’ and localities’ power in protecting undocumented immigrants. Increasing pressure by the Trump administration on city officials to comply with federal immigration enforcement, and the overall polarizing national climate, made it difficult for immigrant nonprofits to advocate for the protection of the city’s undocumented community. De Graauw describes both the limitations of nonprofits in their advocacy for immigrants (beyond just the undocumented) and their strategies to maintain influence in the face of enhanced federal immigration enforcement and local pluralism and fragmentation. In Selection 12, Mary Pattillo examines a different kind of fragmentation that focuses on Chicago’s Southside neighborhoods of North Kenwood and Oakland. More specifically, Patillo introduces the concept of Black power brokers as the “middlemen” in these neighborhoods. The influx of a new Black middle class into the neighborhood led to increasing investment in homes and organizational infrastructure. These new middleclass homebuyers were able to leverage their connections, education, and reputation, which put the incoming Black middle class in North KenwoodOakland in a position of “middlemen,” advocating between the city’s public and private elites and the Black neighborhood residents. Pattillo argues, however, that these “middlemen” were not merely self-motivated but also perceived themselves as having a larger “mission to reestablish a thriving black neighborhood.” They were motivated and able to re-establish Black businesses, organizations, and institutions in the neighborhood that had been lost to disinvestment. On the other hand, Pattillo suggests that in using their financial expertise and sophistication to bring capital and investment to the neighborhood, Black middlemen in North Kenwood-Oakland also spur gentrification. This benefits existing homeowners, as well as the incoming Black middle class itself (themselves incoming homeowners who made financial investments in the neighborhood), but it may ultimately cause the displacement of existing residents, the “littlemen.” Pattillo illustrates the complexity of the role of the Black middlemen as both, middlemen on a mission and individual investors, causing their interests and alignments

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to be multifaceted and complicated. Pattillo’s research underscores the fact that gentrification is a complex process that has many faces and identities, and that powerbrokers of color play key roles in the changing neighborhoods of our cities. Women have only had the right to vote in the United States for over 100 years and make up slightly more than 50% of the country’s population. Yet, they still remain underrepresented in most areas of policymaking. In Selection 13, Melissa Marschall is interested in the particular conditions that make it more possible and likely for female candidates to win mayoralities in Texas. She finds, for instance, that city size matters for the success of female mayors, and that a majority of female mayors are Democrats, rather than Republicans, although many mayoral elections in major cities are non-partisan. She also finds that the number of female mayors overall dramatically increased in Texas during the last four decades. In more recent days, it appears that women mayors tend to be more successful in Texas’ largest cities. This also holds true for cities with higher median household incomes and higher education levels (percentages of residents who hold at least a bachelor’s degree), though the latter results are not statistically significant. Overall, it appears that much more research is needed in order to understand the exact conditions that help put female candidates in local elections into office but Marschall’s research lays excellent groundwork in this important field of research. Historically marginalized groups have had tremendous impact on urban life and policy making throughout American history—in spite of their marginalization. Black elites in cities across the country have pushed local policymakers toward more inclusive policy since the end of the Civil War. They have thrown their support behind both, machines and reformers, in order to see their agendas implemented. Immigrants and women have been key figures in many urban social movements, and they have been important agents for change. Still, there is much work that remains. The events of recent years, with the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin only one in a long line of violence, especially against people of color, show that acts of violence against women and people of color continue to remain a devastating reality of urban life. Profound change can only happen with better representation of people of color and women in political office. The intersectional nature of discrimination based on gender, race, and ethnicity continues to make it more difficult especially for women of color to achieve representation in positions of power in politics and the private sector. The selections here provide important insights into the complex mechanisms that influence both marginalization and empowerment.

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11 Immigrants and Politics in San Francisco Els de Graauw* San Francisco has long been one of the nation’s most liberal big cities, repeatedly bending the curve on important social, economic, and political issues. Well known for promoting neighborhood interests in the face of downtown growth and redevelopment during the 1980s the city was also in the forefront of expanding medical marijuana rights in the early 1990s. It was among the first to offer a citywide minimum wage exceeding the federal and California minimum wages in 2003, same-sex in 2004, and universal health coverage to uninsured city residents in 2007. In 2007, San Francisco also outlawed large supermarkets from using plastic checkout bags, and since 2011, it prohibits restaurants from providing free toys with kids meals that do not meet certain nutritional standards. Yet despite the city’s track record of tolerance and progressivism, San Francisco politics are still hotly contested. It would be wrong to assume that this “left coast city” (DeLeon 1992) would automatically favor immigrant rights and immigrant integration policies. San Francisco has come a long way in how it treats immigrants. During the second half of the nineteenth century, racial discrimination was rampant, and San Francisco led the nation in anti-Asian agitation that climaxed in 1882 with the enactment of the Chinese Exclusion Act. This federal law prohibited the immigration of Chinese laborers and was in place until World War II. Today, in contrast, no city official takes an openly anti-immigrant stance, and the city provides a relatively welcoming environment to immigrants, including undocumented immigrants. Recently enacted immigrant rights and integration policies, however, have had to contend with the many hurdles built into San Francisco’s kaleidoscopic decision-making process. Nonprofit advocates successfully navigated those hurdles to enact and implement several policies that advance immigrants’ needs and interests. San Francisco has a progressive political culture, yet immigrant-serving nonprofits have had to contend with several major obstacles as they advocate for local immigrant rights and integration policies. San Francisco’s

* Reprinted from ‘Chapter 2. Immigrants and Politics in San Francisco’, pp. 57–81 (notes pp. 196-97), Making Immigrant Rights Real: Nonprofits and the Politics of Integration in San Francisco, by Els de Graauw. Copyright © 2016 by Cornell University. Used by permission of the publisher, Cornell University Press.

Chapter 4   Governing Factional Polities in America’s Urban Centers   197

fragmented government, weak political leadership, partyless milieu, and social and ethnic diversity make any kind of democratic change difficult and slow. Additionally, a multitude of competing interest groups, the tendency of policymakers to promote business development policies that strengthen the city’s economy, and the national focus on immigration enforcement have all impeded nonprofit advocacy to expand immigrant rights.

San Francisco’s Immigrants San Francisco’s long experience with receiving immigrants has earned it the designation of a continuous gateway city (Singer 2004). When California joined the Union in 1850, more than half of San Francisco’s inhabitants were foreign-born. As Figure 1 shows, that percentage declined in subsequent decades as a result of federal restrictive immigration laws enacted at the turn of the twentieth century, reaching a low point of 17.7 percent in 1950, and increased again after liberalization of immigration policy in 1965. Soaring rents and housing prices have slowed immigration to San Francisco since 2000, driving more immigrants to the surrounding suburbs (Begin 2011). The city’s foreign-born population grew only 4 percent between 2000 and 2013, compared with 16 percent in the 1990s and 28 percent in the 1980s. In 2013, 60%

800,000

50%

700,000

40%

600,000 500,000

30%

400,000

20%

300,000 200,000

Percent foreign-born

Total population and foreign-born population

900,000

10%

100,000

80 18 90 19 00 19 10 19 20 19 30 19 40 19 50 19 60 19 70 19 80 19 90 20 00 20 13

70

18

18

18

60

0%

18 52

0

Total population

Foreign-born population

Percent foreign-born

FIGURE 1  San Francisco’s foreign-born population, 1852–2013 Source: The 2013 data are from the American Community Survey, three-year estimates (2011–2013). The 1860–2000 data are from Gibson and Jung (2006). The 1852 data are from the California Census.

198  PART II   The Challenges of Governing the Divided Metropolis San Francisco was the nation’s fourteenth-largest city with about 827,000 residents, 36 percent of whom were foreign-born (U.S. Census Bureau 2013b). Given their sustained and large numbers, immigrants made an imprint on the city in the past and continue to do so today. As in the country as a whole, the national origins of San Francisco’s immigrants have changed over time. Initially, the city housed many Mexicans and Asian immigrants. The 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the Mexican-American War and required Mexico to cede the present-day Southwest to the United States, made Mexicans in San Francisco foreigners in their native land (Heizer and Almquist 1971). The Chinese arrived in the 1850s and 1860s to escape war and famine at home and to mine for gold and build railroads in California. They were succeeded by Japanese laborers in the 1880s and Filipino students and agricultural workers in the 1920s (Laguerre 2000). European migration increased in the late nineteenth century, bringing large numbers of Irish and Italians as well as Russian emigres and German Jews to the city. Following the 1965 Hart-Celler Act, which removed restrictions on non-European migration, San Francisco once again drew large numbers of immigrants from Asia and Latin America. They included refugees fleeing brutal wars in Vietnam and Central America, economic migrants searching for a better life, and immigrants joining family members already living in the United States. These successive immigrant waves have changed the ethnoracial composition of San Francisco’s population in dramatic ways. While almost completely white before 1940, San Francisco was a majorityminority city by 1990 with a combined population of ethnoracial minorities exceeding the white non-Hispanic population. San Francisco’s immigrants are a diverse lot, as summarized in Table 5 The majority (64%) hail from Asia, mostly China (36%), the Philippines (9%), and Vietnam (6%). The second-largest group (19%) comes from Latin America, mostly Mexico (8%) and El Salvador (4%). San Francisco continues to attract immigrants from Europe (13%) as well, with the largest number coming from Ukraine (2%). The city’s foreign born vary in the year of entry, but one in three (34%) has arrived to the United States since 2000. Many foreign-born San Franciscans (40%) have not acquired U.S. citizenship, and an estimated 30,00D-45,000 (10-15%) are undocumented (Hill and Johnson 2011; MPI 2014).2 Finally, San Francisco’s foreign born speak a range of languages at home, vary notably in their educational backgrounds, and work in both high- and low-skilled occupations. This diversity makes it hard to generalize about San Francisco’s immigrant population. The focus of much of the activism described in this [selection], however, is on disadvantaged immigrants, a group that includes mostly non-citizens and recent arrivals. Table 6 shows that immigrants—regardless

Chapter 4   Governing Factional Polities in America’s Urban Centers   199

TABLE 5  San Francisco’s foreign-born population, 2013 Foreign-born population

296,342

Region of birth (%)  Europe

13.2

 Asia

63.7

 Africa

1

 Oceania

0.9

  Latin America   Northern America

19.5 1.7

Period of entry (%)   2010 or later

8.1

  2000 to 2009

26.1

  Before 2000

65.8

Citizenship (%)   Naturalized U.S. citizen

60

  Not a U.S. citizen

40

Language spoken at home (%)   English only

14.6

 Spanish

17.7

  Indo-European language

11.8

  Asian language

54.1

  Other language

1.8

Education (%)   No high school degree

26.6

  High school degree

17.6

  Some college

18.5

  Bachelor’s degree

22.7

  Graduate or professional degree

14.5

Occupation (%) Management, business, science, arts

38.6

Service

27.4

Sales, office

19.7 (Continued )

200  PART II   The Challenges of Governing the Divided Metropolis TABLE 5 Continued Foreign-born population

296,342

Natural resources, construction, maintenance

6.1

Production, transportation, material moving

8.3

Source: American Community Survey (three-year estimates, 2011–2013). Note: Occupation data is for individuals sixteen years and over who are employed in the civilian labor force (169,680); education data is for individuals twenty-five years and over (270,573); language data is for individuals five years and over (295,248). Percentages may not add up to 100% due to rounding.

TABLE 6 Selected socioeconomic characteristics of San Francisco’s native- and foreign-born populations, 2013 Native

ForeignForeign-born born citizen noncitizen

530,284

177,745

118,597

4.1

26.1

27.5

25.3

12.6

17.8

54

54.8

72.5

59.6

69.8

5.3

3.8

6.8

  Managerial/business occupation

60.1

39.6

37.2

  Service occupation

11.5

23.5

32.7

  Lives below the federal poverty line 13

12.7

21.9

Median annual household income ($)

85,896

59,861

51,154

Median annual earnings for a full-time 80,123 male worker ($)

53,452

47,605

Population Educational attainment (%)   No high school degree   Graduate or professional degree Language (%)   Speaks English less than “very well”

2.9

Economic characteristics (%)   In the civilian labor force  Unemployed

Source: American Community Survey (three-year estimates, 2011-2013). Note: Education data is for individuals twenty-five years and over, language data is for individuals five years and over, and employment and earnings data is for individuals sixteen years and over.

Chapter 4   Governing Factional Polities in America’s Urban Centers   201

of citizenship status—are more likely than the native born to lack a high school degree, experience difficulty with English, work in the service sector, and have lower median household incomes. It also shows that noncitizens have the weakest socio-demographic profiles. Table 7 highlights how all of San Francisco’s immigrants-regardless of length of stay-have trouble with the English language. It also shows that immigrants who arrived since 2010 have better educational profiles than earlier arrivals and are more likely to hold a professional job, yet they have lower median household incomes, and a much larger percentage lives in poverty. Noncitizens and newcomer immigrants, in sum, are more socioeconomically disadvantaged than immigrant citizens and longer-term residents. They face significant integration challenges. TABLE 7 Selected socioeconomic characteristics of San Francisco’s foreign-born population, by period of entry, 2013 Period of entry Since 2010

2000–2009

Before 2000

Foreign-born population

23,903

77,387

195,052

Naturalized U.S. citizen (%)

3.9

28.2

79.4

No high school degree

15.2

25.1

28

Graduate or professional degree

25.7

17.3

12.7

53.3

56.3

53.7

  In the civilian labor force

56

74.4

60.4

 Unemployed

8.6

6.2

4.1

  Managerial/business Occupation

52.6

34.5

39.1

Service occupation

23.4

33.3

25

Lives below the federal poverty line

35.4

19

13.1

Median annual household Income ($)

35,403

53,719

58,434

Median annual earnings for a full-time male worker ($)

81,000

43,690

53,544

Educational attainment (%)

Language (%) Speaks English less than “very well” Economic characteristics (%)

Source: American Community Survey (three-year estimates, 2011-2013). Note: Education data is for individuals twenty-five years and over, language data is for individuals five years and over, and employment and earnings data is for individuals sixteen years and over.

202  PART II   The Challenges of Governing the Divided Metropolis

Limited English Proficient Immigrants Most immigrant-serving nonprofits in San Francisco are well aware of how difficulties with English hamper immigrants’ integration. “I see language as a gateway integration issue that affects everything else,” an employee of the Southeast Asian Community Center commented, “and when immigrants don’t know English, it hurts them in school and on the job and makes it difficult for them to receive government services, become a citizen, and participate in the political process.”3 An employee of the African Immigrant and Refugee Resource Center said that language is such an important integration issue also because it affects so many immigrants, regardless of national origin or ethnoracial background. “Language barriers are color-blind. They affect immigrants from Mexico, they affect immigrants from China, and they affect immigrants and refugees from Africa.”4 An employee of Chinese for Affirmative Action perhaps put it most succinctly when she remarked that “language is a quintessential immigrant issue. …Who else experiences English language barriers like they do?”5 English is not the home language for many San Franciscans today. Of the foreign born aged five and over, 85 percent (252,189) speak a language other than English at home, and only 15 percent (43,059) speak only English. One out of three (34%, 99,149) speak English “not well” or “not at all;” leading them to be classified as limited English proficient. Most of them speak an Asian language at home (74%, 73,012), followed by those who speak Spanish (20%, 19,563) and then those who speak other languages, including other Indo-European languages (7%, 6,574). Limited proficiency in English makes it hard for them to get an education, improve their job, or participate in American civic and political life (Alba 2004). Despite some who worry that immigrants will never learn English (e.g., Huntington 2004), immigrants are well aware that knowing English will help them get ahead, and most want to become proficient. Yet learning English remains difficult for many. Those who migrated to the United States as adults find it particularly hard. Learning English can take years for low-skilled immigrants working multiple jobs with little time for English classes. Housing segregation and labor market segmentation force many immigrants to live and work in ethnic enclaves where use of English is uncommon (Chiswick and Miller 2005). At the same time, the availability of English as a Second Language classes falls woefully short of demand, and community colleges and adult schools in San Francisco have long waiting lists for immigrants wanting to enroll (Hendricks 2009; Tucker 2006). The absence of suitable opportunities to learn English helps explain why 54 percent of immigrants in San Francisco speak English less than “very well” even after having lived in the United States for fourteen or more years (see Table 7). The continued tempo of migration to San Francisco means that there will always be many individuals who do not speak English as their native

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language. The majority of their children and nearly all their grandchildren -- regardless of national or ethnic origin -- will be English monolinguals (Alba 2004), but first-generation immigrants will continue to struggle with English and thereby risk exclusion. English language training and public accommodation to language diversity will thus be important issues for San Francisco now and into the future. Not surprisingly, some immigrant-serving nonprofits have continuously pushed San Francisco officials to improve immigrant language rights since the 1970s (CAA 2015). Recent decades have seen a surge in policies nationwide that address immigrant language rights. While there is no single nationwide language policy, federal, state, and local authorities have adopted a patchwork of policies regulating the use of English and other languages in education, government, and business. The restrictive “English-only laws” effective in twenty-eight states (including California) and over forty cities seek to protect the status of English against the multicultural influences of especially the growing number of Spanish speakers (English First 2015; Schmid 2001). Many English-only laws (like the one in California) are symbolic, but others officially bar government officials from providing services and information in foreign languages. Symbolic or not, state and municipal English-only activism sends immigrants the message that those who do not speak English well are not welcome to participate in the community; thereby discouraging their integration (Linton 2009). Other policies-including “English-plus laws”6 enacted in-four states and more than a dozen municipalities as well as policies providing for bilingual education and voting ballots-allow people to use foreign languages alongside English in the public sphere (Linton 2009). These policies do not diminish the importance of English but make it easier for limited English proficient immigrants to function in an English-dominant society.

Low-Wage Immigrant Workers Many immigrant-serving nonprofits in San Francisco focus on the plight of immigrant workers. Disadvantaged immigrants often work in low-wage service jobs where wage violations, lack of benefits, and poor working conditions are common (Bernhardt et al. 2009; CPA 2010). Immigrants “come here with dreams of economic success,” an employee of the Chinese Progressive Association commented, “but many never find stable employment that pays a livable wage.”7 An employee of Institute Laboral de la Raza (the People’s Labor Institute) mentioned that many immigrants work under precarious conditions and that “unscrupulous employers take advantage of them and most workers don’t fight the abuse for fear of retaliation.”8 An employee of the Day Labor Program also explained that immigrant labor rights are important because employment issues are tied to other aspects of immigrant integration.

204  PART II   The Challenges of Governing the Divided Metropolis “We want to empower immigrant workers because economic empowerment also promotes their social and political empowerrnent.”9 Noncitizens and immigrants who arrived between 2000 and 2009 are economically most disadvantaged among San Francisco residents, as tables 6 and 7 show. Their median household incomes are markedly lower ($51,154 and $53,719, respectively) than for the native born ($85,896), but this is not because they do not work. In fact, 70 percent of noncitizens and 74 percent of immigrants who arrived between 2000 and 2009 are in the civilian labor force, compared with 73 percent of natives, though higher percentages report being unemployed. A substantial earnings gap drives the income difference: The median income of a full-time male noncitizen worker is $47,605 and for a male immigrant who arrived between 2000 and 2009, the figure is $43,690, compared with $80,123 for an American-born male worker. The lower levels of schooling among disadvantaged immigrants likely explain part of the gap, but its sheer size raises questions about employment equity and labor market segmentation. The economic profile of foreign-born San Franciscans who arrived after 2010 is more of a mixed bag. Their median household income is lower compared with that of earlier immigrant arrivals and a much larger percentage lives in poverty. Yet the median income of a full-time immigrant male worker who arrived after 2010 is $81,500, nearly double that of a male immigrant who arrived between 2000 and 2009. These statistics reflect a growing economic divide also within the immigrant community, with both high incomes for some new immigrant arrivals and high poverty for others. This is the result of the economic bifurcation that has occurred in San Francisco in recent decades. Since the onset of national economic restructuring in the early 1970s, San Francisco’s economy has increasingly specialized in advanced corporate services in management, law, finance, and communications (DeLeon 1992). The shift to a postindustrial economy, which was accelerated by the rapid internationalization of economic activities during the 1980s, transformed San Francisco into a regional center in the global economy with marked occupational and income polarization (Sassen 2001). San Francisco’s late1990s dot-com bubble and current tech boom have polarized its economy even further (Onishi 2012). The city’s restructured economy has produced many more professional and managerial jobs but also more demand for the service workers who make life easier for those in the new economy. These economic changes coincided with the post-1965 influx of low-skilled immigrants from Asia and Latin America, who have become the backbone of the growing low-wage service sector and hospitality industry in the lower tiers of San Francisco’s postindustrial economy (Wells 2000). This new occupational order contains fewer channels of upward mobility from its bottom rungs than did the industrial economy of a century ago.

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Unskilled immigrants from Europe, who made up a significant part of America’s industrial labor force at the end of the nineteenth century, were able to secure a good measure of economic mobility and attain living wages and a comfortable middle-class life style within their lifetime (Bean, Leach, and Lowell 2004). In contrast, much of today’s service work and many hospitality jobs performed by low-skilled immigrants are dead-end jobs that do not pay a livable wage in the context of San Francisco, one of the most expensive cities in the country. They also offer little job security and few benefits and present their own postindustrial health risks (Bernhardt et al. 2009; CP A 2010). San Francisco’s dot-com bubble of the late 1990s and its current tech boom have taken a vast economic toll on low-wage immigrant workers (Lovett 2014; Nieves 1999). An influx of well-to-do tech workers employed by Silicon Valley companies like Apple, Google, and Facebook have been pouring into the Mission district and North Beach, forcing a ruthless gentrification on these heavily immigrant neighborhoods. Real estate and rental prices have soared to unseen heights and evictions have spiked as landlords eject tenants to sell their units in the booming housing market. For many immigrant San Franciscans, including those statistically well above the federal poverty line, economic conditions have become untenable. Some have moved to the surrounding suburbs, where housing is more affordable. Others have stayed but moved into overcrowded single room occupancy hotels in the Tenderloin district and Chinatown, where landlords routinely violate health and safety codes (CJJC 2014). Because many low-wage immigrant workers struggle with English and have little formal education, they find it difficult to participate in governmentsponsored and employer-provided job training programs that could improve their career mobility and help them obtain better-paying jobs (Tumlin and Zimmermann 2003).10 Undocumented immigrants are altogether ineligible for such programs. A range of policies can possibly improve the economic position of immigrant workers with disadvantaged skill sets. Chapter 4 examines one such policy and considers how raising the minimum level of pay provides government with a tool to improve the well-being of disadvantaged immigrant workers whose economic mobility has been constrained by an increasingly segmented labor market.

Undocumented Immigrants Finally, undocumented immigrants in San Francisco confront tough barriers in conducting their daily lives. The federal government’s increased emphasis on immigration enforcement certainly can prevent undocumented immigrants from even taking the first steps to integrate. “The immigration raids [in 2007] sparked so much fear,” a staff member with the Alianza Latinoamericana

206  PART II   The Challenges of Governing the Divided Metropolis por los Derechos de los Inmigrantes (Latin American Alliance for Immigrant Rights) commented, “and many immigrants didn’t want to leave their homes and were afraid to send their kids to school.”11 A St. Peter’s Housing Committee worker added that the difficulty of undocumented immigrants to obtain a government-issued form of identification is particularly problematic. “It’s such a huge barrier to being integrated. … Being able to prove who you are is just so basic for so many things, like renting an apartment or getting a job or getting help from a social service agency or traveling.”12 An estimated 30,000 to 45,000 undocumented immigrants make up 10 to 15 percent of the city’s foreign-born population (Hill and Johnson 2011; MPI 2014). We have no detailed breakdown for them, but data on undocumented immigrants nationwide and San Francisco’s foreign-born population can provide insights.13 The majority likely come from Mexico, elsewhere in Latin America, and Asia. However, a sizable number—estimated at 2,500-reportedly come from Ireland (Shaw 2007). Since California shares a land border with Mexico, many of San Francisco’s undocumented immigrants likely entered the United States by jumping a fence and hiking through the desert or paying someone to help them sneak into the country. Undocumented immigrants from Asia and Ireland likely include many individuals who overstayed legal visas for tourism, study, or temporary work. Undocumented immigrants are likely to be overrepresented in low-skilled and low-wage jobs in the city’s service sector and hospitality industry (Passel 2006). Undocumented immigrants live in the shadows of the law. While San Francisco is a sanctuary city and limits cooperation with federal immigration authorities in all but a few explicit circumstances, undocumented immigrants still fear that interacting with local government officials will increase the likelihood of federal detention and deportation. Their hidden existence undermines their integration and hurts their well-being. When undocumented immigrants do not go to health clinics for preventative checkups, they will end up in costly emergency care when they become critically ill (Berk and Schur 2001). By avoiding police, they become easy targets for crime and inadvertently make the larger community less safe by not reporting crime (Davis, Erez, and Avitabile 2001). When undocumented parents do not interact with schoolteachers, they miss opportunities to improve the academic performance of their children (Delgado-Gaitan 2004). Finally, unscrupulous employers can easily exploit undocumented workers who are reluctant to report abusive labor practices (Gleeson 2012). The overall effect is to condemn those living in the shadows to the underclass. How to deal with the country’s estimated 11.3 million undocumented immigrants remains a controversial issue (Passel et al. 2014). Given the prolonged impasse over federal immigration reform, many states and municipalities have taken immigration matters into their own hands. State officials in Arizona (S.B. 1070), Alabama (H.B. 56), Georgia (H.B.

Chapter 4   Governing Factional Polities in America’s Urban Centers   207

87), Indiana (S.B. 590), South Carolina (S.B. 20), and Utah (H.B. 497) enacted tough laws in 2010 and 2011 in efforts to drive undocumented immigrants away by excluding them from the civic sphere. Following the 2006 enactment of the Illegal Immigration Relief Act in Hazleton (Penn.), more than 130 municipalities have passed or considered similar ordinances that bar undocumented immigrants from working and renting homes in their cities (Varsanyi 2010a). These policies clearly retard integration and only push undocumented immigrants further into the shadows of American society. San Francisco provides a sharp contrast to such reactions.

Government, San Francisco-Style The view from afar may be that San Francisco is a harmonious melting pot where it is easy to enact and implement immigrant rights and integration policies, but the reality is quite different. San Francisco’s city charter makes it difficult to employ government as an instrument for social change. At the same time, the city’s economic and social diversity prevents a natural majority from emerging around any type of policy change, much less one benefiting a disadvantaged immigrant minority. In a city where “democracy is hard work” and “majorities are made, not found” (DeLeon 1992: 13), those advocating immigrant rights have their work cut out for them.

The Mayor and the Board of Supervisors San Francisco is a city-county consolidation, a status it has had since 1856. As a result, the mayor is also the county executive, and the city council doubles as the county Board of Supervisors. The Constitution of California allows for municipal “home rule,” allowing cities to develop and ratify a charter that regulates all aspects of city governance and administration. San Francisco voters approved their first home rule charter in 1898, providing for a mayor, an eighteen-member Board of Supervisors (elected at large), the initiative and referendum processes, and a civil service. However, this system was initially marked by bribery and corruption as well as serious conflicts of authority between executive and legislative officials (Keesling 1933; McDonald 1987). In 1932, San Francisco voters approved a new charter to try to root out political corruption. It succeeded at that and more. The authors of the second charter were convinced that a divided and fragmented government would produce a more honest government. They consequently separated executive and legislative powers, partitioning government into many pieces and isolating powerful politicians (DeLeon 1992; Wirt 1974). […]

208  PART II   The Challenges of Governing the Divided Metropolis The 1996 charter created a more unified executive, yet retained its multilayered character. It eliminated the position of chief administrative officer and put the mayor-assisted by a professional city administrator appointed by the mayor for a term of five years-in charge of the day-to-day management of city departments and agencies. It also gave the mayor appointive, budgetary, and veto powers. […] Executive power in San Francisco is now more centralized than under the 1932 charter, but the mayor still has a hard time exerting top-down influence. The 1996 charter gives the mayor more administrative and legislative powers, but a thicket of boards and commissions continues to filter his executive leadership. With over twenty-nine thousand civil servants (in 2005), the mayor also experiences bureaucratic hurdles in exercising control. To get things done, the mayor consequently needs to build coalitions, negotiate deals with powerful interest groups, and mobilize the energies of the administrative staff under his authority (DeLeon 1992). San Francisco’s multi-layered executive structure provides multiple access points for immigrant-serving nonprofits with public policy aspirations. With a municipal workforce that is diverse in terms of race and ethnicity (see Figure 2), immigrant-serving nonprofits can generally find public employees who are amenable to accommodating the needs and interests of their immigrant co-ethnics. Yet community groups of all sorts have limited access to the mayor and his closest staff, both by charter design and mayoral decision. As San Francisco’s top elected official facing citywide demands, the mayor 50% 40%

43.9 35.2

34.6

33.0

30% 20%

16.5

10% 0%

13.2 13.8 6.4 0.4

White

Black

Latino

Municipal workforce

Asian

0.3

AI/AN

Population

FIGURE 2  Ethnoracial composition of the municipal workforce and population: San Francisco, 2005 Source: Population data are from the 2005 American Community Survey (one-year estimates). San Francisco work-force data are from the San Francisco Department of Human Resources (2008). Note: AI/AN = American Indian/Alaska Native; SF population (estimate) = 719,077; SF municipal work-force = 29,079.

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is likely to heed the interests of individuals and groups with the most voting power and the greatest ability to affect his political fortunes. These do not often include immigrant-serving nonprofits and their clients. To secure policy benefits for the city’s disadvantaged immigrants, nonprofit advocates must therefore develop a variety of strategies targeting a wide range of administrative officials. The 1996 charter vests legislative authority in the eleven full-time members of the Board of Supervisors, who are elected by district to staggered four-year terms. Supervisors are limited to two terms. They initiate and enact legislation, share budget authority with the mayor, and can place proposed initiatives on the. ballot. They can also override a mayoral veto with a two-thirds majority vote and have the power to confirm some mayoral appointments. The Board of Supervisors is also required to provide public access to its meetings, documents, and records. While supervisors still cannot intervene in administrative affairs, they now are allowed to testify at public meetings of executive boards and commissions as well as adopt legislation on administrative matters other than contract and personnel issues. Nonprofit advocates enjoy relatively easy access to their supervisors, who by law must invite the public to testify during regular Board meetings. Given that immigrant communities are geographically dispersed, it can be challenging to advocate immigrant rights policies with some legislators (see figure 3). Each supervisor, furthermore, represents over seventy-five thousand residents and has only three legislative aides. Minimal Board resources can make it difficult for advocates to get immigrant rights issues on the city’s legislative agenda. Legislators also have limited ability to interfere in administrative affairs. Even if nonprofit advocates succeed in engaging a majority of legislators on immigrant rights issues, they cannot count on them to watch over the implementation and enforcement of these policies. For this, they have to turn to administrative officials. Nonprofit advocates thus have to be long-term participants in the policymaking process if they want to influence immigrant rights policies and practices in San Francisco.

The Immigrant Rights Commission and the Office of Civic Engagement and Immigrant Affairs The Board of Supervisors does not have a committee dedicated to immigrant issues, but San Francisco does have an Immigrant Rights Commission (IRC). The IRC’s mission is “to improve, enhance, and preserve the quality of life and civic participation of all immigrants in the City and County of San Francisco” (IRC 2008). Created by ordinance in 1997, the IRC is charged with providing supervisors and the mayor with advice and policy recommendations on issues affecting the city’s immigrants. The IRC consists of fifteen volunteer commissioners, who are jointly appointed by the Board of Supervisors and

210  PART II   The Challenges of Governing the Divided Metropolis Percent foreign-born 0–20% (43 tracts) 21–40% (68 tracts) 41–60% (59 tracts) 61–80% (9 tracts) 81–100% (2 tracts)

N

Golden Gate

Supervisor districts

Treasure Island

North Beach

Marina

Presidio

Chinatown 3 Financial District

2 Western Addition Richmond

5

1

Tenderloin Civic Center

Castro Sunset

Twin Peaks

6

San Francisco Bay

Mission Bay

Mission

Noe Valley

8

4

Potrero Hill

9 Bernal Heights

7 Ingleside

Pacific Ocean

South of Market

Haight-Ashbury

Golden Gate Park

Lake Merced

6

Bayview Hunters Point

Excelsior

11

10

Visitacion Valley

Crocker-Amazon 0 0

1 1

2 mi 2

3 km

FIGURE 3  San Francisco’s foreign-born population by supervisor district, 2009 Source: American Community Survey (five-year estimates, 2005–2009).

the mayor for two-year terms and who hold public meetings once a month. At least eight commissioners must be immigrants to the United States and a director, who reports directly to the city administrator, leads the IRC’s day-to-day operations. Many IRC commissioners are involved in the city’s immigrant nonprofit sector as paid employees, board members, or volunteers. Nonprofit advocates have been frustrated in their attempts to use the IRC to advance their agendas. A Chinese for Affirmative Action employee described the IRC as a “weak commission” that “means well, but doesn’t have the staff, resources, and authority to make a difference.”14 An employee with St. Peter’s Housing Committee similarly remarked that “the commission isn’t the go-to entity for us” because “it doesn’t have any real power.”15 Several

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aides to members of the Board of Supervisors echoed these sentiments. As a result, many immigrant-serving nonprofits bypass the IRC in seeking to influence the policymaking process and go directly to the city’s legislative and administrative officials. Since 2009, San Francisco has also had the Office of Civic Engagement and Immigrant Affairs (OCEIA). Similar to the mayoral offices of immigrant affairs in New York City, Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Houston, Philadelphia, and Seattle, this executive-level office seeks to foster language access and immigrant civic participation. Creating OCEIA was a more serious attempt by the mayor to institutionalize San Francisco’s commitment to immigrant integration, but it is not yet clear how this new office will affect nonprofitgovernment relations. Nonprofit advocates have a variety of perspectives on OCEIA: Some are optimistic that it can support and promote their advocacy, while others are more cynical and fear that it will crowd out civil society initiatives on immigrant rights and integration.

Partisanship, Parties, and Elections San Francisco politics have long been nonpartisan, but the city is not without parties. Local party organizations do not enjoy much visibility with the electorate, and every local official is elected without a party label. Yet voters in San Francisco have strong partisan leanings. “The Democratic Party imbues the partisan air that San Franciscans breathe,” a leading chronicler of San Francisco politics commented, “and in state and local elections the city belongs to the Democrats” (DeLeon 1992: 22). This still is the case, even in national elections, and more than three-quarters of San Francisco voters have supported Democratic presidential candidates in recent years. […] While San Francisco is a one-party town, local Democrats disagree on a range of issues. […] Immigrant-serving nonprofits need to tread carefully when searching for political allies in a city known for its Democratic infighting. The recent progressive insurgency has a lot to do with the city’s switch from at-large backto district elections in 2000. For most of its history, San Francisco had at-large elections, and all supervisor candidates appeared on the voting ballot together and were elected to represent a single citywide constituency. In 1977, the city installed district elections where voters choose one supervisor to represent their district. After the assassinations of Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk by former supervisor Dan White, however, moderates argued that district elections were divisive, and voters approved a return to at-large elections in 1980. Perhaps surprisingly, the Board of Supervisors initially grew more demographically representative under at-large elections. In 1992, for example, the eleven supervisors included five women, two African Americans, one Latino, one Asian, and three gays or lesbians.

212  PART II   The Challenges of Governing the Divided Metropolis By the mid-1990s, however, African Americans, Latinos, and Asians complained that at-large elections failed to represent the city’s ethnoracial diversity, pointing out that it was difficult for supervisors of color to get elected to the Board in at-large elections without first having been appointed by the mayor to fill pre-election vacancies (DeLeon, Hill, and Blash 1998). The local Republican Party, Green Party, and local labor unions similarly complained that at-large elections had given Mayor Willie Brown too much influence over the Board. These frustrations charged a grassroots electoral reform movement to mount a successful ballot campaign to restore district elections in 1996. First implemented in 2000, district elections dramatically changed the composition of the Board of Supervisors. Voters replaced the Board aligned with the administration of Mayor Brown with a more progressive Board with greater independence from the mayor’s influence (DeLeon 2003). The reinstatement of district elections in 2000 redrew the political landscape of San Francisco. It changed the way in which supervisor candidates run for office, the role that local organizations play in elections, and ultimately the way that city hall makes decisions. Local organizations with interests tied to a particular geographic area (such as neighborhood associations) now find it easier to identify the specific supervisor who will represent their interests. The switch from at-large back to district elections has forced immigrantserving nonprofits to rethink how they engage supervisors in discussions about immigrant rights and integration in San Francisco. This is highlighted in the discussion in chapter 3 of the campaign to expand immigrant language access in San Francisco, which nonprofit advocates started in the late 1990s and continued into the 2000s.

Voter Initiatives San Francisco voters can make laws through the ballot. The twenty-five elections that took place in San Francisco between March 2000 and November 2010 featured 193 local measures, an average of eight per election. San Franciscans find themselves voting on a long list of local ballot measures (and state initiatives) in every election because charter amendments and bond measures require voter approval and because both the Board of Supervisors and city residents can place policy proposals and charter revisions on the ballot. Because ballot measures have a prominent role in shaping San Francisco governance and politics, they are similar to a fourth branch of government. … Progressive and conservative groups in the city have both used the initiative process to circumvent elected officials who are unresponsive to their policy demands. Progressive groups relied extensively on initiative campaigns during the 1980s to force elected officials to slow the development of highrise buildings in San Francisco’s downtown area (DeLeon 1992; Hartman 2002). To address the city’s homeless problem, more conservative groups used

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the ballot in 2002 (the “Care Not Cash” initiative) to replace existing cash grants for homeless San Franciscans with food, shelter, and health services, in 2003 to ban aggressive panhandling, and in 2010 (the “Civil Sidewalks”) initiative) to make it illegal to sit or lie on sidewalks during the day. Efforts by immigrant-serving nonprofits to use this means to promote immigrant rights and integration have had little success so far. In 2002, for example, they backed Proposition C, a ballot measure that would have allowed noncitizens to serve on the city’s boards, commissions, and advisory groups. In 2004 and 2010, they also campaigned for similar measures (Propositions F and D, respectively) that would have allowed noncitizens with children in the San Francisco school district to vote in school board elections. All three measures lost, although the margin was slim for the 2004 noncitizen voting measure (51% no, 49% yes).16 These failed ballot campaigns show that a majority of San Francisco voters do not necessarily support pro-immigrant measures, even though survey data show that public opinion is sympathetic toward immigrants.17

Advocating Immigrant Rights in San Francisco Immigrant-serving nonprofits seeking to influence the policymaking process in San Francisco have to contend with three additional challenges. San Francisco has a multitude of interest groups, each pressuring government officials to act on their policy demands. Immigrant-serving nonprofits compete with many other organizations for politicians’ attention in this hyperpluralist environment. San Francisco policymakers also tend to favor pro-growth development policies, which makes it difficult for immigrant-serving non-profits to advocate for redistributing scarce resources to disadvantaged immigrants. Finally, San Francisco’s progressive political culture can actually limit immigrant-serving nonprofits when they push policies that reflect local norms but run counter to federal immigration enforcement goals.

Hyperpluralism Urban scholars have called San Francisco’s organizational landscape “hyperpluralist” (Coyle 1988; DeLeon 1992; Ferman 1985). Tony Kilroy (1999), a longtime neighborhood activist, created a directory of politically active groups in the city. It contained over nine hundred listings in 1999, covering local political clubs, labor unions, business associations, nonprofit organizations, neighborhood associations, and other collectives of individuals who share and act on a common purpose. Some groups have small constituencies with highly specialized interests and few resources, while others are multi-

214  PART II   The Challenges of Governing the Divided Metropolis issue organizations with large memberships and substantial clout, such as labor unions and chambers of commerce. According to Kilroy, about a third of these groups are “always” politically active. My San Francisco government informants agreed that local groups frequently contact them to try to influence their policies and decisions. Scholars of San Francisco politics have concluded that the many activists and organized groups lobbying city hall challenge policymakers’ ability to consolidate power and govern the city’s diverse population. They disagree, however, on how debilitating this hyperpluralism is. Coyle (1988) thinks that the city’s hyperpluralism is unmanageable, concluding that San Francisco is a “Balkans by the Bay.” Ferman (1985), in contrast, contends that skillful mayoral leadership can create order out of hyperpluralist chaos. Sharing Ferman’s optimism that this hyperpluralism is workable, DeLeon (1992: 13) comments that democratic policymaking is “hard work” in San Francisco. […] To build power and influence, … immigrant-serving non-profits therefore have to collaborate with other types of advocacy organizations. In theory, the city’s rich organizational infrastructure should provide them with an array of possible coalition partners. In practice, however, building such cross-organizational coalitions is complicated. Differences in organizational structure, resources, and status between immigrant-serving nonprofits and unions, for example, make it challenging for these organizations to collaborate on supporting immigrant rights. It is also challenging to build coalitions of nonprofits that span different immigrant communities, such as when nonprofits serving Latino immigrants collaborate with those serving Asian immigrants. DeLeon (2003) used San Francisco voting data to show that the city’s major ethnoracial groups have different ideologies on economic and socio-cultural issues. Whites are ideologically polarized between those who are progressive and conservative on both economic and socio-cultural issues. Latinos tend to be progressive on both economic and socio-cultural issues. Asians tend to occupy a middle position on both issues but frequently align with conservatives. Finally, most African Americans are progressive on economic issues and conservative on socio-cultural issues. Because Latinos and Asians-the city’s largest foreignborn groups-have divergent ideologies on economic and socio-cultural issues, nonprofits representing these groups cannot necessarily count on working together. Later chapters show that when immigrant-serving nonprofits do work together in multiracial and multicultural coalitions, tensions can arise due to differences in advocacy strategies, organizational age, and size.

Urban Redistribution Peterson (1981) explains that cities’ primary concern must be to maintain and enhance their economic activity. Because cities are subject to stiff economic

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competition from other cities and have few powers independent from state and federal governments, they depend heavily on their own tax revenues. To create and maintain wealth and revenue, cities must attract and retain businesses and jobs. According to Peterson, this explains why they favor business development policies that yield fiscal resources over redistributive polices that drain such resources and hurt cities’ competitive positions. Extending Peterson’s logic, it is easy to imagine why city officials would resist enacting and implementing immigrant rights and integration policies. Such policies arguably help only a small segment of the population, including non-US citizens. They simultaneously impose costs on other city residents and create the perception that the city is an expensive place to do business. San Francisco does not fully conform to the Peterson model, but redistributive policies still compete with developmental ones. As a peninsula city, San Francisco exercises near-monopolistic control over its land area. This makes it easier for San Francisco to retain mobile capital and, in theory, also gives city officials more freedom to enact redistributive Policies. The city’s small size (47 square miles) and scarcity of developable land, however, produce fierce competition over land use. Community activists who oppose greater densities in their neighborhoods and demand that land be used to build affordable housing have long battled large-scale developers who want to attract new capital to the city (DeLeon 1992, 2003; Hartman 2002; Mollenkopf 1983). The recent progressive majority on the Board of Supervisors is more open to policies that benefit workers, the poor, and minorities. Yet San Francisco officials—and the mayor in particular—are still keen to improve the city’s economic vitality, as was true earlier decades. Between the early 1960s and mid-1980s, San Francisco’s transformation to a postindustrial service economy went hand in hand with extensive urban redevelopment. With the stimulus of federal urban renewal grants, a pro-growth coalition of business, labor, and political leaders set about to improve the city’s physical conditions. Together, they cleared “blighted” areas around the downtown business district by removing undesirable populations (including immigrants), improving regional transportation, and constructing high-rise office buildings, ultimately giving San Francisco its Manhattanized skyline (DeLeon 1992; Hartman 2002; Mollenkopf 1983). When the federal government retreated from urban renewal in the 1970s, cities increasingly privatized their economic policies and created partnerships with business interests to fund urban development (Luce 2004; Peterson 1981). In the 1980s and 1990s, San Francisco officials developed tax breaks for businesses and public subsidies for development projects so that the city could compete for mobile capital.18 They also provided infrastructure to reduce the costs of doing business in the city19 and lowered the cost of providing public services by contracting with nonprofit organizations, including those serving immigrants.

216  PART II   The Challenges of Governing the Divided Metropolis In this context, immigrant-serving nonprofits have found it challenging to convince San Francisco officials to spend scarce resources on disadvantaged immigrants. Opponents of immigrant rights and integration policies often couched their opposition in terms of cost and expressed concern about the effects on the city’s already strained budget. Certain business interests strongly opposed raising wages for the city’s lowest-paid workers, who include many immigrants. They felt that measures like the San Francisco Minimum Wage Ordinance would transfer money from the hands of businesses to those of the poor, undermining the city’s competitive position. Nonprofit advocates therefore had to convince city officials that such policies would not just benefit deserving immigrants but would also advance the interests of other city residents and city government.

Federal Immigration Enforcement The U.S. Supreme Court has declared repeatedly since the late nineteenth century that power over immigration and citizenship rests exclusively with the federal government. This position is known as the plenary power doctrine, which holds that only the federal legislative and executive branches can decide which foreigners may enter and legally reside in the United States, when they can be expelled from the country, and when and how they can acquire U.S. citizenship (Aleinikoff, Martin, and Motomura 2008). States and municipalities have no authority over these questions. When states and municipalities do attempt to enter the immigration domain, as many have in recent years, courts have often declared their policies-regardless of whether they restrict or expand immigrant rights-unconstitutional. While states and municipalities cannot control their borders and regulate the flow of immigrants in and out of their jurisdictions, they can draw on their power to protect the health, safety, and welfare of their residents to adopt measures that affect immigrants. Since the U.S. Congress failed to enact comprehensive immigration reform in 2006-2007, more and more state and local governments have used labor regulations, housing policies, local land use provisions, identification requirements, and access to health and education services to affect immigrant settlement (NCSL 2013). Many of these policies have been restrictive, seeking to drive immigrants away. But others like those enacted in San Francisco, intend to provide immigrants with new rights and benefits. San Francisco’s immigrant-serving nonprofits have developed the normative orientation that immigrants, regardless of their citizenship and documentation status, can and should make claims on city government. The larger national political context, however, has made it harder for them to advocate immigrant rights policies, especially if they accommodate undocumented immigrants. The terrorist attacks of 2001 increased public

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opposition to undocumented immigration and engendered federal laws, administrative practices, and court decisions limiting the rights and freedom of movement of undocumented immigrants (Jones-Correa and de Graauw 2013). The media, anti-immigrant groups from outside San Francisco, and federal officials have all pressed for federal preeminence in regulating undocumented immigration when San Francisco has considered initiatives to protect and benefit undocumented immigrants. These mounting pressures on San Francisco officials to align their policies and practices with federal enforcement objectives have hindered non-profit advocates in their quest for immigrant rights and integration policies. The increased federal scrutiny of the city’s lenient treatment of undocumented immigrants drove a political rift between the mayor and the Board of Supervisors. Federal immigration enforcement activities in the Bay Area also caused undocumented immigrants to retreat from public life and avoid contact with local government officials. All in all, federal intervention soured the advocacy context in San Francisco and weakened the existing consensus among key city officials in support of new immigrant rights and integration policies. This has pressed immigrant-serving nonprofits to be more strategic in framing their advocacy so as to minimize media and political scrutiny and to ensure that the champions of federal immigration preeminence do not reverse their policy gains.

Strategic Local Advocacy San Francisco is home to a large number of disadvantaged immigrants who face significant integration hurdles. Immigrant-serving nonprofits have promoted their social, economic, civic, and political rights with San Francisco officials. They have had to contend with challenges stemming from San Francisco’s fragmented government, weak political leadership, partyless milieu, and social and ethnic diversity. San Francisco’s hyperpluralist organizational landscape, policymakers’ propensity for business development policies that strengthen the local economy, and the city’s progressive political culture in a nation focused on immigration enforcement present them with additional challenges. …

References Unless otherwise noted, population statistics are from the three-year estimates of the 2011-2013 American Community Survey. Immigrants’ naturalization rate in San Francisco (60%) is higher than at the national level (46%). There is no evidence to suggest, however, that this contributed to patronagestyle politics, where members of the Board of Supervisors enacted immigrant rights and integration policies in exchange for immigrants’ votes. In August 2015, immigrants made up only a small proportion (23%) of all 433,000 registered voters in San Francisco (“Online Counts Reports” 2015). Furthermore, the proportion of

218  PART II   The Challenges of Governing the Divided Metropolis noncitizen immigrants living in poverty in San Francisco in 2013 (22%) was higher than the proportions of naturalized immigrants and native-born residents (13% each). Immigrants who would benefit the most from immigrant rights and integration policies are the ones without voting rights. Interview, April 26, 2005. Interview, February 9, 2005. Interview, February 22, 2006. English-plus activism emerged in reaction to the English-only movement in the late 1980s. Proponents of English-plus legislation seek to promote greater acceptance of language diversity by encouraging individuals to gain proficiency in English plus one or more foreign languages Gones aud Singh 2005). Interview, May 25, 2005. Interview, February14, 2005. Interview, February 11, 2005. Most public-funded employment services assume that participants have ninth-grade levels of education and basic English skills. Most private-funded training programs target skilled workers and managers (Capps et al. 2003; Tumlin and Zimmermann 2003). Interview, February3,2009. Interview, February 9, 2009. In 2010, St. Peter’s Housing Committee and Just Cause Oakland merged to form Causa Justa Gust Cause). An estimated 11.2 million undocumented immigrants resided in the United States in 2010, including 6.5 million from Mexico, 2.6 million from other countries in Latin America, and 1.3 million from Asia (Passel and Cohn 2011). According to estimates from the General Accounting Office (2004), between 27 and 57 percent of all undocumented immigrants in the United States are visa violators who overstay their temporary non-resident visas. Interview, August 2, 2006. Interview, February 1, 2006. Hayduk (2006) provides a more detailed analysis of these measures and why they failed. The 2000 Roper Social Capital Benchmark Survey, a Harvard-based research project measuring Americans’ civic engagement, includes a sample of five hundred San Franciscans. This sample mirrored the diversity of the city’s population in terms of race, ethnicity, gender, age, and immigration status (272 respondents identified as non-Hispanic white, 42 as African American, 74 as Asian, 67 as Latino; 265 respondents were females; respondents came from all age ranges; 53 respondents were non-U.S. citizens). The survey contained one question on immigration, asking respondents to evaluate the following statement: “Immigrants are getting too demanding in their push for equal rights.” Seventy-six percent (374/490) of respondents disagreed (either strongly or somewhat) with this statement, while 22 percent agreed (either strongly or somewhat). City subsidies to redevelopers were common during the administration of Mayor Willie Brown (1996-2004). Brown’s pro-growth stance was apparent in 1997, when he announced at the groundbreaking for a new project: “Mayors are known for what they build and not anything else, and I intend to cover every inch of the ground that isn’t open space” (King 2004). For example, the Third Street Light Rail—a major north-south transportation corridor connecting downtown with San Francisco’s southern boundary—went into service in 2007.

Chapter 4   Governing Factional Polities in America’s Urban Centers   219

12 White Power, Black Brokers Mary Pattillo† In everyday slang, there is the littleman and the middleman, and at the top is just “the man.”1 For African Americans, “the Man” is usually white. “Every city has its police department,” wrote Eldridge Cleaver in 1968, when Los Angeles’s police department was still overwhelmingly white. “No city would be complete without one. It would be sheer madness to try operating an American city without the heat, the fuzz, the man.”2 The littleman, on the other hand, is not always so racialized. He can be the worker in a big firm, the disaffected citizen who doesn’t vote because politicians never listen, or the shortest kid in the class. Civil rights lawyer and later Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall was known as “the little man’s lawyer.” The man and the littleman flank the middleman. This [selection] is about that man or woman in the middle. The person in the middle, if she’s good, speaks at least two languages in order to translate, has two sets of credentials for legitimacy, and juggles a double-booked calendar to keep all the cordial, memberships current, and constituencies appeased. The classic middleman in today’s metropolis is the immigrant store owner in the black community, selling to the littleman goods and services provided and financed by the man. Most of the time this arrangement runs smoothly, but misinterpretations (e.g., over prices or policies) and unmet reciprocal obligations (e.g., hiring local residents, supporting local institutions) can be damaging. The system can be volatile, as evidenced by riots in black communities that target immigrant businesses.3 The situation in [Chicago’s neighborhood of] North Kenwood-Oakland is similarly precarious as black middlemen work to combat the racism that has created a neighborhood as poor and neglected as North Kenwood-Oakland, but do so by making alliances with the descendants of the original perpetrators. “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house,” admonished scholar and poet Audre Lorde. This is the frustrating dilemma of the black middleman filled with good racial uplift intentions but bound within a system of strategies that sometimes work in the opposite direction. There are many similar formulations of this middleman concept. Sociologist Robert Park coined the term “marginal man” to describe † Used with permission of University of Chicago Press - Books, from ‘Chapter 3, White Power, Black Brokers’ in Black on the Block: The Politics of Race and Class in the City, Mary E. Pattillo, 2007, pp. 113–115, 117–119, 121–130, 131–138, 140–141; permission conveyed through Copyright Clearance Center, Inc.

220  PART II   The Challenges of Governing the Divided Metropolis immigrants, people of mixed race, and—for him the archetypal marginal man—Jews. Racial, ethnic, and cultural domination, mixture, or contact create marginal men, Park argued, who experience a “sense of moral dichotomy and conflict … when old habits are being discarded and new habits are not yet formed.” Anthropologist Victor Turner called it “liminality,” or the state of those who are “betwixt and between.” In immigration studies, especially those focusing on Mexico and Central America, a whole literature has been developed out of the multiple metaphors of borders/fronteras. Mexican migrants, for example, cross not only national borders but also linguistic, cultural, racial, economic, and political ones. The richness of this literature comes not from studying either what life was like for migrants in their home countries or what it is like in the host country, but in exploring the border itself, the line between being Mexican and being American, between speaking English and speaking Spanish, the line where immigrants perform old traditions with new materials and in new places. These halfway states are the domain of middlemen. Mexican migrants bring their labor power to “the man” and transport earnings, goods, and new skills back home to the littleman. Sociologist Ronald Burt calls this phenomenon, when it occurs in the world of business and industry, filling “structural holes,” or operating in the space “between people who vary in their behavior and opinions.” These brokers, or “information arbiters/” are adept at “translating” ideas and best practices across different segments of the firm and thus are better positioned to identify and take advantage of opportunities.4 W. E. B. DuBois characterized the middle somewhat differently for African Americans. “One ever feels his two-ness,” DuBois wrote of the black experience: “an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.” DuBois posited a double consciousness rather than a split consciousness. He did not argue that a black person would be one person at one minute and another person at the next, with the latter person having little awareness of the former. DuBois’s formulation is about, not liminality, but simultaneity. The black experience is not half of this plus half of that, but a full part of each; not this or that, but both. There is no middle in this formulation -- no transitional point in a journey of migration, hybridization, and later-generation assimilation; no central actor linking organizational nodes; no entrepreneurs shuttling goods from profiteering corporations to paycheck-to-paycheck consumers. African Americans are not somewhere between being Negroes and being Americans; they are both, bonded and wrapped in “one dark body.” It is DuBois’s double consciousness, on the one hand, and theories of boundaries and boundary spanning, on the other, that I am trying to join in this exploration of black middlemen. […] The extent or degree of that otherness, however, is captured in the black middleman concept. The black middleman occupies a classic liminal

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position. Much of life is lived on the border rather than fully in the worlds on either side: in the car between a predominantly white workplace and a predominantly black neighborhood, in a sentence that uses “ain’t” but crisply pronounces all of the “-ing” endings, walking across the stage to receive a bachelor’s degree to give to mom, who dropped out of high school. Straddling these two worlds, black middlemen take up new positions within the black community and vis-à-vis the man. When directed upward, they can be either supplicants or claimants, and when looking downward, they may be suppliers or enforcers. They are brokers of a wide variety of resources. As in double consciousness they exemplify a blackness not erased by being American, and an Americanness marked by racial flourishes. And as in fronteras they are forever using their varied training to translate the interests, demands, and perspectives of the man to the littleman, and vice versa. My typology of the roles and actions available to middlemen rests on three concessions. First, the presence of a middleman assumes at least a tripartite system of relationships. It requires that there be both some person or group with more power or resources and another person or group with less. In a bilateral arrangement, on the other hand, the middleman becomes the littleman vis-à-vis the man, or the man vis-à-vis the littleman. Second, microsettings have their own status hierarchies, which may differ from those that rule relationships on the macro level. Elijah Anderson and Mitchell Duneier both studied small group cultures of black men who could demand little from their workplaces or from city government, but who enjoyed the honor and deference of their peers; within his own neighborhood, family, bar, work-place, or church, in other words, the littleman was transformed into the man.5 The criteria by which people are evaluated within their small groups may be economic, as when a group of poor girls elevate one of their number who carries a designer handbag, but such judgments may also be based on verbal skills, height, athletic talent, toughness, beauty, or any number of other characteristics. One of the consolations of the human tendency toward rankings is that almost everybody can come out on top in some clique and relative to some particular measuring stick. The third and final concession is related to the second. Even at the macro level, where people are stratified based on their possession of resources or talents, the littleman is not always powerless and the man is not forever powerful. “Them that’s got shall get,” Billie Holiday sang. “Them that’s not shall lose.” But history has shown that it is possible to triumph over such tyranny. While poor or otherwise disadvantaged groups may not have money, wealth, educational credentials, the right skin color, or prestigious jobs, they can have charisma, moral capital, creativity, determination, or just sheer numbers. These resources have been harnessed, heroically, in anticolonial struggles and labor movements, gender revolutions and squatter settlements. Unfortunately, even the gains from these upheavals seem over time to be recalibrated to keep the man on top.

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Choosing Sides There is considerable complexity in the middleman role due to the permutations of allegiances and alliances that he or she might forge. These relationships are “variables” in the most literal sense, since the nature of the middleman is the ability to assume different stances in dealing with the constituents above and below her. As one such broker in Chicago’s Latino community remarked, “There are no permanent friends and no permanent enemies.”6 This vacillation is not necessarily a strategic or instrumental maneuver. On the contrary, because they have been shaped by many worlds, middlemen have sincere interests that coincide with the groups on either side of themselves, and can genuinely make bargains with each. Taking different sides in different contexts is in fact how they maintain legitimacy. At times middlemen may act strategically, taking a particular side solely to gamer favor or obtain rewards, but such internal states are mostly hidden and not discernible by my ethnographic eye. Hence, this analysis is not concerned with the credibility of middlemen, or with the ethics behind the positions that they take. Despite the fluid and dynamic tenor of middlemen’s negotiations, a broad typology is possible. When middlemen are upwardly aligned, when they side with “the man,” their duties toward the littleman are often coercive and exclusive. In the realm of community development, the upwardly aligned middleman might be the spokesperson for a city agency charged with communicating to neighborhood residents the city’s plans for, say, a new professional sports arena that will be placed in the neighborhood and cause significant displacement. She might be the head of a community organization that gets a large foundation grant, which requires, that her organization implement a vision of community improvement emphasizing home ownership over affordable rental housing, even though most of her constituents are not prepared to buy a house. She may speak in a language that intimidates and confuses community members who have little exposure to city bureaucracy. He might be a resident who works to rid the main street of businesses that have not maintained their awnings or signs in favor of newer chain stores that offer premier services at prices that are prohibitive for families on fixed or assisted incomes. The upwardly aligned middleman acts opportunistically, using’ the master’s tools” either because she herself stands to gain by doing so or because he has been employed or co-opted to do so. All of these approaches move toward more exclusive community institutions rather than inclusive ones, and are implemented more by fiat than by participatory debate and negotiation. On the other hand, middlemen can side with the littleman and confront the man. In the 1960s, when African and Caribbean states were gaining their independence, theorist Frantz Fanon wrote the following about the black middlemen in these new countries: “In an underdeveloped country

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an authentic national middle class ought to consider as its bounden duty to betray the calling fate has marked out for it, and to put itself to school with the people: in other words to put at the people’s disposal the intellectual and technical capital that it has snatched when going through the colonial universities.”7 […] Instead of being firmly aligned in either direction, the men and women who successfully occupy the middle are brokers. They put people together, they negotiate subsidies and concessions, they run interference, they relay information, and they mediate disputes. As brokers, they also take a cut, which may come in the form of a consulting fee, a salary, a program grant, a board appointment, votes, verbal accolades, or, if they are also residents, a share in the benefits that flow from the local investments they have brokered.8 Having set up the ideal types and discarded them for a more moderate amalgam, it is now necessary to eschew the pure middle middleman as an abstract construction as well. The notion of a perfectly flexible and fair middleman suggests a measure of neutrality that does not accurately portray the black middlemen operating in North Kenwood-Oakland. As I have argued, one of the defining characteristics of black middlemen is that they have walked through (or pushed open) the doors of opportunity, reaped the benefits therein, and built boundary-spanning networks that keep them engaged with both the littleman—here the collective poor and workingclass black community—and the man: white corporations, government bureaucracies, and civic leadership. In their ascent (for those who started from humbler beginnings), they have been transformed. The Chicago Reporter, an investigative magazine with a focus on race and poverty, once did a feature story on African American pastors who received monies from Mayor Richard M. Daley’s administration in order to build housing and provide social services in the black community. The Reporter generated considerable controversy and dismay when it asked if these clergy were “prophets or puppets” for participating in such partnerships. These character poles may be a bit extreme, but it is impossible to become engaged in a new world and not take on some of its dominant opinions and perspectives.9 Given the relatively privileged positions of North Kenwood-Oakland’s black middlemen, they share significant interests with the man. Their gaze and aspirations are directed upwards. The reality of their blackness in a black milieu -- the power of the collective “dark body” — makes unavoidable a certain allegiance to African Americans with fewer means, but the expression of that allegiance now operates through certain filters. Their advanced educations have given them new theories, their cocktail conversations have given them new interpretive schema, and their broad exposures have erased the limits of action. As a result, they sometimes tackle the problems of housing, education, business development, and job

224  PART II   The Challenges of Governing the Divided Metropolis creation differently than would the people who are in need of an affordable apartment, functional schools, goods and services, and decent employment. In addition, their tastes and tolerances—for fresh food or fast food, rap or jazz, air conditioning or a summer breeze on the porch, a laundromat or a dry cleaner, extended or nuclear families—have been shaped and altered by their relative riches. The black middlemen in North Kenwood-Oakland are not simply unbiased brokers able to mediate without self-interest. They have glimpsed, and sometimes even attained, the comforts of money and prestige, and they do not plan to give those up. If it is not too trucing, they hope to pass some of those goodies on to less fortunate black kin and neighbors, but their methods occasionally require breaking racial ranks. […] Political scientist Adolph Reed argues critically that the use of black middlemen as spokespeople explains how policies that are horrendously bad for the black community at large, but good for black elites, garner mass black endorsement. Through the magic of linked fate, the good fortune that will come to black elites, “when filtered through the discourse of symbolic racial collectivism, [becomes] a proxy for broader racial redistribution.”10 Linked fate, then, operates to suppress, at least initially, objections to what black middlemen have to say, and to grant them a more favorable reception than if they were not black. Linked fate does not, however, completely mute discussion and debate since the view that “what is good for the black community will be good for me” also works in the reverse: what is bad for black people will be bad for me. Bad political agendas are just as consequential as good ones. Linked fate only means that there might be a pause before the challenge if the messenger is black. The assumption is that if a black protagonist similarly believes that her fate is linked to that of other African Americans, then she would not put forth an idea that will be harmful to the race.11 Once the collective rightness of a plan, a goal, or a direction is considered, debates may ensue. Black middlemen participate in these debates, in which they often have the upper hand by dint of authority, title, and, sometimes, no small amount of perks to distribute to those who join their camp.

Brokering Capital The most obvious resource that black middlemen have secured for North Kenwood-Oakland is mortgage capital. In 1989, Oakland ranked seventyseventh out of Chicago’s seventy-seven community areas in mortgage dollars received. Total lending in the neighborhood amounted to a paltry $224,000 dollars, compared to $33 million in Hyde Park and $258 million in Chicago’s predominantly white Lincoln Park neighborhood. By 2000, Oakland had moved up to number fifty-two, garnering over $3 million dollars in mortgage financing, and by 2003, total lending amounted to over $24 million dollars,

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more than one hundred times the amount invested in the neighborhood in 1989.12 North Kenwood-Oakland’s newcomers created a housing market where none existed. First they focused the attention of the city and other institutions, and then they became the demand side of the classic economic principle, thereby jump-starting a supply of investments that had long been withheld. And demand is quite literally what they had to do. The middle and upper incomes of NKO’s new black residents were not enough to convince banks and other lenders to take a fresh look at the neighborhood. Instead, newcomers devised a variety of strategies to buy homes. They made creative arrangements with sellers, they paid in full and rehabbed gradually using their salaries, and they pulled equity out of other homes to finance the new ones. Most consequentially, though, they were insistent that traditional banks support their decision to move into North Kenwood-Oakland, and they worked their networks and social clout to get mortgages. Explicit and purposeful neglect of black central-city neighborhoods like NKO ultimately made them high-risk lending areas, which in turn solidified and justified their economic unviability. This was the investment vacuum that newcomers were challenged to fill. Many NKO residents could tell this story of disinvestment from black communities as well as any social scientist. Emmett Coleman, who moved from Hyde Park to North Kenwood in 1983, gave a concise but thorough account of why North Kenwood was in some of its darkest days when he first moved in. “What happened during the ‘60s, [the neighborhood] was split up,” began the history lesson Coleman thought important to understanding NKO’s contemporary reality. He continued: The dividing line was at 47th Street. So you had South Kenwood from 5lst to 47th, and 47th to 39th was considered North Kenwood. Unfortunately, following the split, there was evidence of redlining. And by that I mean banks would not lend money. The city was more negligent toward that area. And the problem was compounded because during the ‘60s and the ‘70s, there were a lot of federal funds that were going into neighborhoods. And the majority of this money was targeted to the area of South Kenwood. And I don’t know whether they had in mind that this would be a buffer, but North Kenwood suffered because of this. The neighborhood suffered the redlining to which Coleman refers for almost sixty years, running nearly unabated from as early as the 1930s into the early 1990s.13 Home maintenance is the first thing to suffer when mortgage monies are scarce. With lower appraised values, home owners lack the financial equity to reinvest in infrastructural and cosmetic upkeep, not to mention the inability to take out loans to finance college, start new businesses, or smooth income insecurities that result from unemployment, retirement, or poor health. Some home owners are just stuck in redlined neighborhoods, unable to sell their homes or buy another home elsewhere

226  PART II   The Challenges of Governing the Divided Metropolis in any financially prudent manner. As the surroundings deteriorate physically and socially others make the decision to rent out their houses, cutting them up into apartments to provide income to finance a new home in another neighborhood. This was the housing market that greeted Emmett Coleman and others as they looked to move into NKO in the 1980s and 1990s. Gayle Peters first moved to North Kenwood as a renter, but soon after decided to buy a house. I asked her about the daunting task of buying a three-flat building and rehabbing it all on her own. “Oh, God!” she answered. “Oh, my God. [Getting financing] was horrible. You know they say redlining doesn’t exist, but that’s a complete lie.” Getting a mortgage was obviously an obstacle for Peters, one that would have been impossible to endure and ultimately overcome without both her exposure to the world of home finance and her ability to make a persuasive and documented argument to potential lenders. She told the following flustering story: Ten years ago when I was trying to get financing—I’ll never forget— when I applied for my first loan with them, they just flat out denied me. Now, I worked in this field for years. You know, I audited credit unions and I looked at loan files. So I know what the guidelines are. So I know I qualified. So I said, okay, I’m writing letters and, you know, going back and forth with them. The same bank denied me three times before they approved me.. .. So I finally got them to do the deal. But they wouldn’t loan me the money for the rehab. … I had to end up writing letters about the area and the changes that were coming up, put-in newspaper dippings. I went through this whole thing about what this area was going to become. Because they did not believe that the money that I was asking for-that the house was ever gonna appraise out at that. And they basically told me that. “This house would never appraise out at this. You putting too much money into this.” … I knew what the plan was for the area so I knew that eventually, hey, it’s gonna be worth a lot more than I’m even asking for. I didn’t think that actually it would be where it is today, though. I really didn’t. I didn’t see that.

Peters was not the first applicant to be denied a mortgage in North KenwoodOakland for reasons that seemed unrelated to her ability to pay. But how many denied mortgage seekers would be able to mount as feisty a campaign as she did? Would most people even have had sufficient experience to smell something fishy? Or would they, instead, accept the rejection with dejection, never questioning how the bankers arrived at their conclusion? Gladyse Taylor, who was looking to buy a house in Oakland in the late 1980s, remembered going into a bank to apply for a home loan. “I was very excited, and before I sat down in the chair they said no.” Most rejections probably weren’t this dramatic, and were no doubt curtly conveyed in a form letter: “Your

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application for a mortgage has been denied.” NKO’s older working-class residents would not have been savvy enough to test what seemed to be a done deal. While a portion of them would have had middle-class credentials (some college or white-collar jobs), most were handicapped by a lack of education, older age, or few other assets, which together put their applications in the marginal category. More importantly, many of the older residents had bought their homes before thirty-year fixed-rate private mortgages were the norm, so they had limited knowledge of the opaque evaluation procedure that spits out acceptance or rejection letters. Gayle Peters, on the other hand, was able to broker her mortgage and rehab loans because of the human and cultural capital at her disposal. College educated and entrepreneurial, Peters had worked both in state government and as an independent auditor, giving her familiarity with fair housing and lending guidelines and considerable exposure to the mortgage market. She had the education and the resources to write numerous letters in a language and style that ultimately resonated with the lenders. In practice, this means that she had full command of the lending lexicon and could communicate with data that they understood—Chicago Tribune articles that heralded the transformation of North Kenwood-Oakland, plans for new housing announced at the meetings of the Conservation Community Council, neighborhood projections done by the Chicago Department of Planning and Development. She delivered her arguments in typewritten letters that indicated her level of professionalism, subtly conveying to the bank that she may have the right contacts to make an even bigger issue out of this. When Michael and Sylvia Smith were beset with similar frustrations in financing their home purchase in Oakland, they did exactly that—made a big legal fuss. “Our credit was Al,” Mrs. Smith said proudly, but somewhat bitterly given that it seemed inconsequential when they struggled with four different banks in order to get a mortgage in 1992. “One bank we wound up suing because they made us wait for the appraisal.” The kind of subterfuge that the Smiths experienced in the mortgage market exemplifies the discrimination uncovered in numerous studies of housing and lending discrimination.14 It is never blatant, but neither is it something that African Americans are searching out to make a quick dollar through a lawsuit, catching racists in the act. In fact, Mr. Smith was initially incredulous: “I didn’t think it was gonna be an issue. I really didn’t.” But when the couple did suspect discrimination they were prepared to follow through. Mr. Smith continued his story about the bank’s refusal to give him and his wife a copy of the appraisal. That caught me too. 1Cause I called just figuring out1 well, how long it would take to get [the appraisal]. You know, two, three days, weeks? And that was my only concern. He said, “We don’t do that.” And I said

228  PART II   The Challenges of Governing the Divided Metropolis “I beg your pardon. You don’t do that? I thought I paid for it.’ And I said, “Well, didn’t I pay for it? Then I’m entitled to a copy. You know if I paid for it, this is America. ‘ He said, “No, that’s not our policy.” I said, “That’s not your policy?” I called the state’s attorney’s office to make sure I wasn’t, you know, I wasn’t going crazy and I didn’t assume anything. I mean, I had never seen it legally written. I was always of the understanding over the years that’s how business was done. So we went out there and sued ’em. The judge settled it on our behalf ‘cause they never showed up. Twenty thousand dollars. But they filed bankruptcy.

Hiding behind the official but vacuous language of a “policy,” the bank did not likely expect the boldness with which the Smiths pursued this act of discrimination. Or the certitude with which they acted to claim their entitlements of citizenship, that part of DuBois’s double consciousness that is not always granted. “This is America,” Mr. Smith pro-claimed, with the unvocalized subtext being “And I am an American.” To fully realize this assertion required the activation of skills and capacities rooted in Mr. Smith’s middle-class status. He had to know or be able to find out what government office could correctly inform him of his rights. He needed a telephone to call them and needed not to be worried about the cost of malting multiple phone calls, not a given in poor and working-class households. He also had to be financially and intellectually able to mount a credible legal case against the bank. Jacqueline Callery also had a problem with her appraisal. She didn’t sue, nor did she acquiesce. She was just insistent. “I had to redo the appraisal and tell the man from the bank what number I expected,” she said with no hint of sarcasm. She and her husband did not have problems with their initial financing because they used a bank where a dose friend worked, a classic brokering maneuver to achieve some ends that are unlikely to be realized without such a productive network tie. But when it came time to get a home improvement loan to insulate the walls in their hundred-year-old home, they were met with skepticism. Unlike the cloud of mystery surrounding the Smiths’ appraisal, the appraiser for the Callerys’ bank did not hesitate to make comments about the negative effect of nearby public housing on the value of their home. Taking this as a sign of bias, Mrs. Callery, a professor at a Chicago business college, decided there was a minimum value she would accept. When the appraisal came back below that, she protested. “At a minimum,” she declared, “I was going to get credit for my third floor. So I looked up the standards. I looked up the code. I looked up how much height you had to have, and I used my six-foot-three husband and had him stand up and I said, ‘Can you look at how much height there is above his head. That is a usable floor.’ And so mainly, I made it justified based on floor space. I can’t fight the subjective subtracting, the arbitrary subtracting.” Resigned to the unfair fact that her house would be devalued because it was

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on the wrong side of 47th Street, she disputed the more objective factors, ones that required her to research obscure building and appraising methods and make a compelling case based on them. “And I rewrote it,” she said about the appraisal, which ended her saga with the banks and their delegates in her favor. Using social, human, and cultural capital, the Smiths, Gayle Peters, Mrs. Callery, and others like them forced the otherwise impersonal banking institutions, which had for years summarily dismissed the investment potential of North Kenwood-Oakland, to be responsive to their desires to put roots in the neighborhood. Community organizations like the Kenwood Oakland Community Organization (KOCO) were also instrumental in convincing investors to put their money in NKO. KOCO had both social and financial goals in mind when it got involved in rehabilitating apartment buildings to improve housing options in the neighborhood. Its leadership wanted both to provide decent housing to low-income residents, and to support social programming, such as after-school tutoring, food pantries, and employment services, through the monies generated by management fees. The benefits would be dispersed not simply among the new tenants and recipients of KOCO’s services, but also among neighbors more broadly, who would be rid of the dilapidated, dangerous large apartment buildings, eyesores that fostered feelings of unsafety. Organizations like KOCO worked outside of the traditional mortgage market, instead using financial tools designed to create affordable housing, most notably the Low Income Housing Tax Credit program, a Reagan-era invention that gave private investors tax incentives for their investment in affordable housing. Buildings built or rehabbed with tax-credit dollars primarily serve working households rather than the lowest income households.15 KOCO was the lead organization for developing over three hundred units of tax-credit housing in NKO. While it did not prove to be an income-generating venture for KOCO, it did begin the transformation of NKO’s physical landscape. People driving by inspecting the neighborhood as a possible place to move now saw the early signs of improvement: new windows, tuck-pointed brick, and budding flowers. KOCO’s work also illustrated that successful resource brokerage is as much about teaching the man something as it is about serving the littleman. In 1998, Vice President Al Gore visited North Kenwood-Oakland touting President Clinton’s increased commitment to affordable housing construction. The Chicago Tribune reported: In 1987, Kenwood community leaders would hardly have believed that the new yet obscure federal financing tool they used to help build the neighborhood’s first new housing in 40 years would set the stage for one of the country’s most dramatic turnarounds for an inner-city community. Yet, because of additional housing and development that

230  PART II   The Challenges of Governing the Divided Metropolis sprouted as a result of that decision, Vice President Al Gore came to Kenwood Tuesday to announce that the Clinton administration’s proposed federal budget would include a dramatic increase in the program responsible for the change. Under the proposed 1999 fiscal year budget, federal tax credits designed to encourage construction or renovation of low-income housing would be expanded by 40 percent over the next five years.16

Similarly, a director of the private asset-management company that partnered with KOCO recognized the organization’s role in opening the eyes of private investors: But what they did do was demonstrate in a sort of bizarre way that it could be done. By this I mean they demonstrated to the private developer that neighborhoods were worth investing in. That you could turn them around. That you could make them viable places again in which to live. And certainly Kenwood has proven that. And so that was a very important contribution. In fact, I used to always tell the not-for-profits: you ought to really see your job as demonstrating in the short run what could be done. Private developers having seen that, they’re willing then to come in. And then let them do so, [and] you go on to something else that you’re better at.

The middleman role that black middle-class newcomers and organizational leaders played in NKO in obliging private lenders to pay attention to them as a growing market is akin to that played by the entrepreneurial immigrant middleman. Ethnic entrepreneurs use assets accumulated in their home countries, coethnic credit associations, and a collective positive reputation established with private lenders to convince banks to capitalize their endeavors in areas where the local population does not have the same clout and that larger enterprises avoid. These immigrant middlemen are the conduits of capital and goods from “the man” to the littleman. Black middle-class potential home buyers similarly use their reputations, connections, incomes, and wealth to funnel dollars from private lenders to the neighborhood. The motivation of these middlemen is different, however, from that of immigrant entrepreneurs, whose primary reward is a comfortable livelihood for themselves. While black middle-class brokers in NKO definitely have their self-interests served by securing financing to invest in a home, they also express a mission to reestablish a thriving black neighborhood. They see themselves as caring for the vintage houses, filling in the spaces where houses were destroyed, bringing back black (and other) businesses, and reinvigorating the (black) organizational and institutional life. Whether they

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are coming back or not, they emphasize their “blackness” on the block as a strategy of racial uplift. […] Where then are the allegiances of the black middlemen who created the demand that made the supply of mortgage dollars flow? They are clearly with the littleman, who has lived in NKO for years and weathered the storms of disregard. The new arrivals are also betting that they will get rich in the process of igniting the North Kenwood-Oakland housing market, and the banks that were brought in kicking and screaming also stand to make a lot of money. So while this is not a case of pure altruism, it nonetheless highlights the impact of black middleclass middlemen in funneling resources from the man to the littleman.

From Redlined to Red Hot In a perfectly functioning housing market, the rising demand for homes in NKO, the infusion of capital, and the higher home appraisals would be an unequivocally and all-around good thing. Yet this logic holds only for owners, be they middle class or not, and most longtime NKO residents are not owners. Moreover, there are risks associated with rising values for home owners who do not want to follow the efficiency rules of the market and cash out for more reasonably priced housing elsewhere. The biggest costs of staying are the rising property taxes, assessed on the rising property values. Smaller costs may include compliance with landmark guidelines, new block-club dues, and social pressure to make costly cosmetic improvements, such as installing wrought-iron fencing, sandblasting stone exteriors, or sprucing up the yard. Aggressive mortgage marketing poses another threat to low-income home owners in the neighborhood, who are more easily fooled by promises of cash that have severe hidden strings attached. Subprime lending is growing in Chicago, and increased foreclosures follow close behind.17 As the houses in North Kenwood-Oakland grow more valuable, predatory lenders have an even greater incentive to target the neighborhood. When the middlemen who came to NKO as conveyors of mortgage capital transform into the engines of the growth machine, interested in ever-rising property values, they give up their downward (or neutral) alignment. Driven by the self-interest of protecting and growing their housing investment, they begin to do the bidding of larger outside developers and the city, which always looks to fatten its tax coffers. The growth machine concept suggests the upward alignment of North Kenwood-Oakland’s black middle class with civic, business, and elected elites to achieve growth goals in those segments’ interests. The families who can persevere as prices rise stand to benefit

232  PART II   The Challenges of Governing the Divided Metropolis handsomely from this growth logic, but fewer and fewer of those stayers will be littlemen. Kirk Clemons and his wife approached the notion of buying a house in North Kenwood with none of the pro-black sentimentalism that suffused the moving stories of the Smiths and Paula Butler. Instead, they constructed a decision matrix. “Coming back [to Chicago], we were surprised to find the amount of redevelopment in the city and basically we did a decision matrix on Excel. Put the MBA to work,” crowed Mr. Clemons. The Clemonses were considering two other homes, one a bit cheaper and one a bit more expensive, each with unique amenities and things lacking. They assigned weights to each of the things they wanted in a home, with the highest priority put on “opportunity for appreciation.” People buy houses for many reasons, but few of them disregard the question of value trajectories, and some of them, like the Clemonses, deem financial returns as the most important variable. Kirk Clemons, then, represents a kind of middleman different than those discussed above. Perhaps, more precisely, he represents a different stage of black middleman activism (or a second wave of black middlemen), since many newcomers who fought for mortgage capital in order to build a black residential Eden also desire Eden to be lucrative. In order to insure rising property values, residents make clear their preferences for bigger and more swankily appointed housing units that command higher “price points.” In this instance, they are not brokering goods that will be passed through to working and poor families in NKO, but rather aligning with the man’s desire to maximize profits and revenue, which manifests favorably for them as rising home equity. Black middle-class brokers justify this intervention to their poorer neighbors by preaching the need to bring in higher-income neighbors in order to create the ripple effect of better supported schools, a greater variety of businesses, and infrastructural improvements. “You need some high-end stuff here, guys, sorry,” said Jacqueline Callery when community leaders were deciding what kind of housing they should invite through a request for proposals to developers. Elaborating on the premise that wealthier residents make the city bureaucracy more responsive, she continued,;/ “Because you need some money. You need taxes. Because then you can demand the city make changes. You can demand more lighting in your alley, you can demand better [trash] pickup, you can demand the street cleaners make it over here as often as they do in Hyde Park. You know, stuff like that.” Spinning high-end housing as a broad community good, Callery’s logic challenges my characterization of middleman growth machine politics as self-serving and upwardly aligned, placing it instead in the same light as brokering mortgage capital, which redounds to low-income owners as well. While intent may be focused downward, however, results are not assured in that direction. Callery’s logic benefits

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low-income residents only if they are still in the neighborhood by the time public agencies start responding to their higher-income neighbors’ muscle flexing. Research on gentrification challenges the notion of widespread displacement, but it does find the gradual replacement of poor households with nonpoor ones.18 When brokers encourage private builders and investors to take full advantage of this new market, it leaves some people behind. The price trajectory in North Kenwood-Oakland has clearly been upward. Since 1998, when I began my research, prices for homes and condominiums have increased from just under $100 per square foot to more than $200 per square foot (or $300,000 for a fifteen-hundred-square-foot condominium/home). The city planner assigned to the neighborhood often reminded the community that prices for vacant land had doubled during his five years of service to the neighborhood, and had increased fivefold from 1994—when the first new batch of single-family homes was constructed—to 2004, from $6 per square foot to over $30 per square foot. “Land prices have shot through the roof in this area,” he commented to the Conservation Community Council. “In many ways, you are a victim of your own success.” But many council members did not see it this way. Increasing land value was not an evil, and thus they were not victims of it. What they were victims of was discrimination that kept land prices artificially lower on the black South Side. “How much is [vacant] land in Lakeview?” one council member inquired of the city planner, with subtle ulterior motives. The answer: “$100 per square foot, and some people say maybe as high as $350.” The point was made. Lakeview—a North Side lakefront neighborhood with a black presence of under 5 percent—was really the proverbial roof, and NKO’s land prices, roughly one-third to one-tenth of those in Lakeview, were no where near shooting through it. This meant there was still lots of room for growth in North Kenwood-Oakland real estate prices. Council members frequently pushed developers to realize that growth, or cheered them when they did it on their own. Alderman Toni Preckwinkle once reported to the council: You all should know that your influence is quite important here because the developers did not think they could make their price points for their development. The developer was initially very resistant to the suggestions made by the community that would increase the price of the condos, but now they are happy they were forced to make those changes.

City officials encouraged residents to encourage developers to aim high, and developers were encouraged by buyers who responded positively. […]

234  PART II   The Challenges of Governing the Divided Metropolis City representatives from the alderman’s office, the Department of Planning, and the mayor’s office also took their turn at lead. Like the newcomer residents who had to prove to mortgage lenders that NKO was a safe bet, the city too had to lure new investors through incentives. The City of Chicago was a major landowner in the neighborhood, and wanted to unload its holdings in order to return the land to revenue-producing private hands. In the beginning, the land was cheap and so there was a built-in incentive for people to buy it. But the city also discounted large plots of land in order to encourage comprehensive plans. For individual residents, the city was almost giving away land. If you lived next door to a vacant piece of land owned by the city, you could buy it for $1 and use it to expand your yard or build a garage. This kind of investment paid off royally when land prices increased. The owners could reap the full profit from having doubled the square footage they owned. This also made sense from the city’s perspective since it hadn’t been getting anything out of the land as owner, while selling it meant it could be assessed for property taxes. By the late 1990s, all of this changed. The city’s approach to land sales in NKO took a turn. “With the development in the conservation area, at this point everything is for sale,” announced the city representative when a home owner wanted to buy the city-owned lot next door through the $1 program. A few months later, when explaining why a home owner would have to pay full price (rather than the “open space” appraisal price) for land she wanted to buy to expand her yard, the city representative tersely confirmed the paradigm shift amongst his superiors in the Department of Planning, “Right now they want the most they can get for everything.” Same tango, different lead. Sometimes, residents had to inspire cautious developers with their vision of high-end homes for high-end buyers. There was one comer in the neighborhood that had scared off more than one investor because developers did not think they could sell what residents wanted built there. On the west side of the 4400 block of South Greenwood Avenue sat four mansions and one big vacant lot. Council members wanted mansions to finish off the block, but developers weren’t buying it because they didn’t think buyers would. To continue the dance metaphor, residents thought the timid developers were missing the beat. In response to one developer’s proposal to build two-story, twenty-four-hundred-square-foot townhomes on the land, a council member who lived across the street commented with some disdain: “Most of the [existing] buildings on that street are three stories. What they are proposing is really not a mansion compared to the houses nearby.” Trying to be responsive but betraying his doubts, the developer responded: “If the market is there for something larger, and we will be able to tell from what we sell, then we will definitely push up the square footage.” Council members were unconvinced, and when the developer returned a few months later with

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what council members again deemed to be puny designs, he was met with the same disapproval. Someone at the meeting added that not only were his proposed “mansions” not mansions, but the corner was in the heart of the landmark district and would thus receive the highest scrutiny from the landmarks commission. Unlike the times when developers yielded to council members’ persistence and followed their lead, this time the developer quit the dance altogether. Sure that he could not sell a mansion in North Kenwood, he backed out of the deal altogether. While the dance did not work with this particular partner, council members later got their wishes for that corner in the form of designs for seven-thousand-square-foot mansions, the neighborhood’s first million-dollar homes. […] Alderman Toni Preckwinkle has been a prominent activist for increasing the supply of affordable housing in the city and has worked with developers in her ward to do the same. She introduced legislation into the Chicago City Council that would require developers to set aside 15 percent of their newly constructed or rehabbed units for affordable housing. It is rare that city representatives promote less profitable deals, such as those that include affordable housing or require city subsidies over more profitable, marketrates ones, and Preckwinkle’s affordable housing bill was not passed by the city council. But this is also what distinguishes the goals of black middlemen from the more single-minded goals of growth machines. The middleman is the pivot man, and on these occasions the African American city representatives were looking out for the littleman. Just as the city occasionally eschewed the most profitable use for a piece of land in order to attain a social good, some developers too have underscored their desires to build affordable housing. One developer had a favorite refrain. He wanted to build housing so that people in the neighborhood could “move up without moving out.” In 2000, he partnered with the Chicago Department of Housing to build single-family homes for $240,000. This price brought unexpected scrutiny because it was low in comparison to other homes of similar sizes being sold in the neighborhood. “Why not charge more and get less exterior maintenance by making the house full masonry?” asked a council member who had computed the price per square foot at a deflated $100, and wondered why the developer wouldn’t add the premier finishes and raise the asking price. Two city representatives intervened: “This program is not looking to compete with all of the high-end products,” clarified a Department of Housing official. In an even more concerned tone, a Department of Planning employee added, “I’m a little worried that $240,000 is deemed an ‘affordable’ product when this house is fully within the design guidelines of the conservation area.” A similar exchange occurred regarding another plan to build housing for working families. When a council member objected to a developer

236  PART II   The Challenges of Governing the Divided Metropolis building affordable housing on “one of the primest lots in the city,” a city representative answered, “This is one way to put the parcel back in development in a sensitive way, to get more affordable housing done, to take some of the control out of the developers’ hands, capture some of the resources, and spin on developments.” These were moments when toes were mashed, the dance lost its synergy, and it was unclear just who was supposed to be leading the dance toward higher housing profits. Why is the participation of black middlemen in growth machine politics upwardly aligned? To analyze the character of black middleman activism, one must ask: Who is the primary beneficiary? In the first example of black middlemen using their social and human capital to entice mortgage capital, the first winner is the black newcomers themselves, followed by long-term owners who can access funds that were not previously available to renovate, upgrade, or, if they wish, sell their homes and buildings. All existing residents get to enjoy improved upkeep of the neighborhood’s housing stock. Similarly, the first winners in black middlemen’s efforts to increase property values are, again, black middle-men themselves. But low-and moderate-income NKO residents are not the secondary beneficiaries in a growth regime because their tenure in the neighborhood is threatened by growth. They are targeted by investors who hassle unsuspecting home owners to sell at low prices; they are victimized by subprime lenders who see the potential profits when someone forecloses; and they are subject to the higher property tax levy, which is especially onerous for residents with fixed and/or low incomes. […] Even if poor households do not move out of gentrifying neighborhoods any more than they move out of other kinds of neighborhoods, as the displacement literature finds, when they do move they are replaced by higherincome households, taking that apartment or home off of the market of affordable apartments or homes. Working- and lower-middle-class families who were able to move into NKO in the early years of its renewal are also priced out by rising property values. That is, NKO is essentially off limits to littlemen from outside of the neighborhood who are looking to buy a house. Instead, the big winners are opportunistic mortgage companies, developers who convert apartments into condominiums and whose incomes grow with the sales prices, and the city, for which more high-priced houses translate into more parks, more tourists, more roads, and more incentives to businesses. In sum, hen, the role of black professional newcomers to North Kenwood-Oakland as middlemen in the real estate process is a mixed blessing for the neighborhood’s littlemen. It brings much needed capital to a neighborhood that had long been neglected, but this renewed attention also spells danger for home owners and renters who are overrun by more savvy investors.

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Notes  1 It will be clear throughout this chapter that the man, the middleman, and the littleman can all be women, but I use the masculine form because it makes for simpler and catchier prose.   2 Cleaver 1968, 130 (emphasis added).   3 Hubert Blaylock (1967) and then Edna Bonacich (1973) first laid out a theory of “middleman minorities” as applied to immigrant ethnic entrepreneurs. Bonacich characterizes this group as “sojourners” and argues that “since they plan to return, sojourners have little reason to develop lasting relationships with members of the surrounding host society” (586). While this obviously differentiates immigrant middlemen from the indigenous black middlemen that I am exploring here, one continuity in the term is in the function of middlemen as “act[ing] as a buffer for elites bearing the brunt of mass hostility because they deal directly with the latter. In a word, middleman minorities plug the status gap between elites and masses, acting as middlemen between the two” (584). See also Light and Bonacich 1988; Lee 2002.   4 Park 1928, 893. Park’s discussion of Jews—drawn from Georg Simmel’s notion of the “stranger” and echoing the work of DuBois, but without acknowledgment— describes a scenario very much akin to the one I outline here for middle-class African Americans. He writes: “When, however, the walls of the medieval ghetto were torn down and the Jew was permitted to participate in the cultural life of the peoples among whom he lived, there appeared a new type of personality, namely, a cultural hybrid, a man living and sharing intimately in the cultural life and traditions of two distinct peoples; never quite willing to break, even if he were permitted to do so, with his past and his traditions, and not quite accepted, because of racial prejudice, in the new society in which he now sought to find a place. He was a man on the margin of two cultures and two societies, which never completely interpenetrated and fused” (Park 1928, 891-92). Turner 1967; Alvarez 1995; Anzaldiia 1999; Burt 2004, 354. Also see Burt 1992. For a review of research on boundaries, see Lamont and Molnar 2002.   5 Anderson 1978; Duneier 2001.   6 Alderman Daniel Solis, quoted in Sanchez 2006.   7 Fanon 1963, 150.   8 Burt 2004 finds that brokers who fill structural holes have higher salaries and are promoted more quickly than people whose social networks are more insular.   9 Dumke 2000. For a look at Chicago’s Latino middlemen, see Sanchez 2006. 10 Reed 1988, 164. See also Stone and Pierannunzi 1997; Swain 1993. 11 Given the available evidence that subscribing to the idea of linked fate does not vary by income and is stronger among more educated blacks, it is a reasonable assumption that middle-class blacks see their own fate as tied to any policy or program that affects blacks as a whole. See Simpson 1998, 23; Harris-Lacewell 2004, table 3.10. 12 Rankings are standardized to reflect total lending dollars per mortgageable unit. Rankings for North Kenwood are not reported because it is a part of the larger Kenwood community area. Lending data by census tract show that mortgage dollars in North Kenwood totaled $3.9 million in 1989 and rose to $30 million

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13

14 15 16 17 18

by 2000. Figures for the same years in South Kenwood were $13.7 million and $52.3 million. Investment in North Kenwood began earlier and has outpaced that in Oakland, although Oakland’s lending trajectory is steadily-upward and has considerably more room for growth. See Woodstock Institute 1991, appendixes 1and3; Woodstock Institute 2002, appendixes 1 and 2. In the 1930s, the United States Federal Housing Administration (FHA) created “security maps” for every city in the country (Jackson 1985). The maps established some neighborhoods as high-risk areas for mortgage investments; such areas were given a “D” rating and were not eligible for federally insured mortgages. “X” neighborhoods, by contrast, were good bets for mortgages, ones that the federal government would insure. “B” and “C” neighborhoods fell between these two poles. The FHA often marked off neighborhoods with red boundaries, or shaded whole areas red, to indicate parts of a city that banks should avoid when making loans. In 1938, the Chicago Housing Authority created a map of mortgage-lending risk in Chicago based on the FHA’s evaluations. At this time, North Kenwood and Oakland were both still predominantly white but sat just at the eastern edge of the Black Belt. This proximity of “inharmonious racial groups,” as the FHA warned its appraisers, made such areas less than appropriate for mortgage dollars. Consequently, North Kenwood and Oakland were both given C ratings by the FHA, meaning that the agency would insure only ten-year mortgages, as opposed to the thirty-year mortgages available in A neighborhoods. North Kenwood-Oakland was not alone in being deprived of mortgage capital; only a few sections of Chicago were given the coveted A rating. These included Hyde Park and South Kenwood, the neighborhoods that hugged the north-side lakefront, and the areas at the farthest edges of the city. The Chicago Housing Authority summarized the message of this map bluntly: “All Negro census tracts fall within the area where loans have not been made by the major loaning agencies, and loans will not be made” (Chicago Housing Authority 1938b; Chicago Housing Authority 1938a, 35). For a discussion of race and mortgage capital in Chicago and beyond, see Squires et al.1987; Squires 1994; Stuart 2003. Stuart 2003; Turner et al. 2002. Cummings and DiPasquale 1999. Nancy Ryan, “Gore Visits Revitalized Kenwood,” Chicago Tribune, January 14, 1998. lmmergluck and Smith 2004. Freeman 2005.

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13 A Descriptive Analysis of Female Mayors: The U.S. and Texas in Comparative Perspective Melissa Marschall‡ Research on women in local government traces back to the mid-1970s, when the Center for American Women in Politics (CAWP) conducted its first survey of women in municipal offices, and when several other studies examined the correlates of female mayors and city council members in nationally representative samples of medium- and large-sized U.S. cities.1 Case studies were also a relatively popular mode of inquiry during this early period.2 Although articles and studies continue to be published occasionally, overall, there is considerably little research on women in municipal politics, elections, and governance. This is especially true of research on female mayors. Not only are there very few accounts of the empirical landscape of female mayoralties, but there are also no systematic studies of the rise of women to the office of mayor.3 While one important reason for this gap in the literature is the absence of centralized data on local elections,4 even when election data or rosters of mayors and other local officeholders exist, correctly assigning gender is a difficult and time-consuming coding task. Consequently, even basic questions like when the first female mayors appeared in different states or regions of the country, how many female mayors are currently (or historically) in office, and in what types of cities women are most likely to run and win the mayor’s office have not been rigorously investigated or answered. This [selection] takes a modest step in addressing this gap in empirical description. It begins by first reviewing the more general research

‡ Copyright © 2016 from ‘Chapter 3. A Descriptive Analysis of Female Mayors: The U.S. and Texas in Comparative Perspective’ by Melissa Marschall, pp. 35–51, in Local Politics and Mayoral Elections in 21st Century America: The Keys to City Hall, Sean D. Foreman and Marcia L. Godwin (eds.), 1st Edition. Reproduced by permission of Taylor & Francis Group, LLC, a division of Informa plc. Permission conveyed through Copyright Clearance Center, Inc. The author would like to acknowledge research assistance from Rachel Galton, Madeleine Tibaldi, Caitlin Laird, Brendan Zheng, Emily Flood, Tina Nazerian, and Alexander Haer.

240  PART II   The Challenges of Governing the Divided Metropolis on women in politics, focusing on what the literature has identified as the main constraints and barriers to women’s representation in politics and elections, particularly at the local level. From here there is a summary of the descriptive landscape, identifying what we know about female mayors and the municipalities they govern. The third section […] includes a case study of woman mayoralties in Texas. Its rather conservative political culture and traditional family values are usually seen as impediment to women’s political success. However, Texas has remarkably high numbers of women mayors, particularly in its largest cities. For example, among the 20 largest U.S. cities, 13 have elected a female mayor at some point in their history. Six of these 13 cities are in Texas. In addition, unlike most other major U.S. cities, in Texas many of the largest cities have elected more than one female mayor. In fact, Houston is the largest U.S. city to have elected (and reelected) two women mayors—Kathy Whitmire (1981-91) and Annise Parker (2009- present)-and Corpus Christi, population 312,195, elected its third female mayor (Nelda Martinez) in 2012. Finally, the largest cities in Texas can also claim several firsts-the first Latina mayor in the U.S. (Laredo), the first openly gay female mayor (Houston), and one of the first cities to elect a female mayor (San Antonio). Houston is currently the largest city in the U.S. to be governed by a female mayor. Mayor Annise Parker, former software analyst, small-business owner, and president of the Houston LGBT Political Caucus, was elected to her first term as mayor in 2010. When Parker officially announced her candidacy for Houston mayor in 2009, she stressed her history as a Houstonian, her political experience, and her financial acumen. Parker’s election as mayor was important not only because of her gender, but also because of her sexual orientation. Houston remains the most populous city to have elected an openly gay mayor. Though Parker’s sexuality was never a secret, she has largely avoided politicizing the topic. In her third and final term as mayor, however, Parker put the issue on the agenda. In the spring of 2014, Mayor Parker pushed for and sponsored a sweeping, LGBT-inclusive equal rights ordinance. Paradoxically, Houston had been the only major city in the country without civil rights protections for its residents. This changed on May 28, 2014, when the city council passed Mayor Parker’s ordinance. Without Parker’s leadership, the ordinance likely would not have been proposed or would have excluded citywide employment protections in addition to public accommodations and city contracting. While the purpose of this chapter is more descriptive than explanatory, it concludes with some suggestions for how future research might fruitfully pursue some of the questions and ideas raised by the descriptive analysis. In particular, what explains the relatively high incidence of female mayors in Texas’s largest cities, and why have so few other major cities experienced the same level of success? How can we build on existing studies of female

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mayoralties in order to better explain when and where female candidates for mayor emerge and what factors shape their chances of claiming victory on Election Day?

Women in Elected Office: An Overview Throughout most of U.S. history, women were outsiders to politics and governance. Without the legal right to vote, they were formally barred from participation and excluded from positions of authority and influence. Though women gained partial suffrage in many western states in the late 1800s, and eventually full voting rights with the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920, the legacy of discrimination and exclusion lived on. Historically, women have been handicapped by the lack of or difficulty in raising campaign funds. Even today women’s campaigns have a harder time attracting money from traditional sources, which typically means they rely on a less wealthy donor pool than men and therefore must spend more time and energy on fundraising than their male counterparts.5 As 2013 Los Angeles mayoral candidate Wendy Greuel put it: I talked to a lot of men, I said, ‘How come you can easily raise X amount—$10,000, $20,000, and get people together to do that,’ … And they said, ‘Because men are used to the quid pro quo. I give you, you give me.’6

The quid pro quo that Greuel refers to is based on familiarity and trust that exists among men but oftentimes does not extend to women. Indeed, not having a place at the table for generations has meant that women continue to be excluded from the inner sancta not only of political parties, but of business and professional networks as well.7 This exclusion is evidenced in studies that find women less likely to be recruited by public officials or political parties. The lower incidence of this sort of recruitment is significant since some research finds candidates recruited by political officials or party organizations are the most likely to win local elections.8 In addition, negative recruitment or the attempt by others (friends, coworkers, family, public officials, etc.) to discourage office seeking is more prevalent among women candidates.9 Although the resistance to their candidacies especially by family and friends does not necessarily deter women from running, it likely imposes some psychic disadvantages that shape women’s electoral fortunes.10 Apart from the greater constraints women face accumulating financial and political capital, female candidates face other obstacles in winning elections and retaining elective office. In particular, local governing and electoral arrangements have also been linked to gender representation in

242  PART II   The Challenges of Governing the Divided Metropolis mayoral and city council office holding. For example, studies find women’s representation to be inversely related to the desirability and importance of office.11 Because women may shy away from or encounter greater competition for political offices that are better compensated or that have longer terms and more prestige, they tend to seek or be more likely to win elections for lower-prestige offices. Studies have also examined the effects of district versus at-large electoral systems12 and partisan versus nonpartisan elections.13 With regard to the former, findings are rather mixed. On the one hand, at-large systems provide more opportunities for candidates and more choices for voters and are therefore presumed to attract and produce more female candidates.14 On the other hand, district seats are typically viewed as less prestigious, and this, in conjunction with recruitment patterns and gender stereotypes, is argued by others to give district systems the edge when it comes to promoting female candidates.15 When it comes to the partisan elections, one argument is that political parties tend to overlook women and typically do not encourage or promote their candidacies.16 Another argument is that nonpartisan elections provide less information to voters, which in turn encourages them to rely more on stereotypical judgments that tend to disadvantage female candidates.17 On the other hand, some studies have found that parties do support and recruit women candidates.18 While the effects of partisan elections in many studies are nonsignificant, in one of the most systematic analyses of female mayoralities, Smith et al. found a significant and negative effect.19 Women face a number of other obstacles that discourage them from running for elected office. For example, research finds that family responsibilities and child rearing impose greater barriers to women’s candidacies, even for local offices.20 In addition, compared to men, women are more likely to view themselves as not sufficiently qualified to serve in office21 and are less politically ambitious22 and less self-confident. 23 Combined, these factors lead to the common “I never imagined myself” phenomenon (e.g., “I never imagined myself as mayor”) so typical among women. This attitude is fueled in part by the lack of female mayors and other female political leaders to whom girls and women can look to as role models and mentors. Particularly in light of research that finds that women are perceived as less competent than men, particularly at tasks related to management, the lack of female mayors or other executive officeholders as role models may be especially detrimental.24 Indeed, exposure to politically significant women has been found to positively affect the political socialization of young girls in a number of important ways, including increasing their political participation and office seeking.25 As the literature reviewed suggests, the primary barrier to women’s representation in elected office lies more in the initial stage of candidate

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recruitment and emergence than in the actual electoral contest itself. According to existing studies, it is the lack of female candidates rather than the poor showing of female candidates at the polls that best explains their underrepresentation. However, these studies have been largely based on state or federal offices rather than local or mayoral positions.26 Thus, it is not clear that this finding can be generalized to local office holding, particularly across states and regions, where such dramatic differences exist in political culture, local governing arrangements, and broader contextual factors that likely shape women’s decisions to seek political office. Apart from actually entering the race, studies also point to other factors that influence women’s electoral fortunes. In particular, female mayors are presumed to be more prevalent in municipalities with higher proportions of highly educated and wealthy residents, a liberal or progressive political climate, and effective women’s organizations such as the League of Women Voters.27 In addition, women mayors are also more prevalent in cities located in the western region of the U.S., although there has been almost no theoretical or empirical inquiry about why this is the case.

What Do We Know About Female Mayors and the Municipalities They Govern? Although female politicians for the most part did not appear until the 20th century, at the local level women emerged as candidates and elected officials earlier. This is largely due to the old adage that “all politics is local” and the fact that the problems of local communities at the turn of the 20th century prompted women to seek voting rights in local elections more than for elections at other levels of government.28 In 1887, Kansas became the first state to extend women the right to vote in municipal elections. In this same year, a small town in Kansas, Argonia, elected Susanna Salter-the nation’s first female mayor.29 Over the next several years, other Kansas towns followed suit, bringing the number of towns to have experienced female mayoralties to roughly 25 by the turn of the century. Prior to passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920, female mayors were elected exclusively in small towns, primarily in western and Midwestern states, but also in Florida, where the municipal charters of many newly incorporated cities extended voting rights to women.30 Larger U.S. cities did not begin electing women until later. In 1926, Bertha Knight Landes became the first female mayor of a major U.S. city (Seattle), with Portland and Sacramento following suit in 1948. Among major U.S. cities, no women were elected in the 1950s, and only two were elected in the 1960s: Eleanor Parker Sheppard (Richmond, VA) and Antonina Uccello (Hartford, CT).31 In fact, it was not until the 1970s that women began to make much impact

244  PART II   The Challenges of Governing the Divided Metropolis in mayoral office holding, at least in major (i.e., those with populations over 150,000) U.S. cities. Among these cities, it took another decade for the first African-American woman to hold the mayor’s office (Lottie H. Shackelford, Little Rock, in 1987)32 and another two decades for the first Latina to be elected mayor (Elizabeth “Betty” Flores, elected in 1998 in Laredo, Texas). Though there are no established archives of women mayors in U.S. cities, based on data collected by Weatherford, 37 cities with populations over 150,000 had elected a female mayor by the year 2007. Of these, the majority (18) were cities in western states.33 Cities in southern states represented the second largest number of female mayors (8),34 followed by cities in midwestern (7)35 and northeastern (4) states.36 Though many western states granted partial or full suffrage to women prior to 1920 and were associated with strong progressive movements earlier in their history, it is not clear that this explains the relatively high rates of female mayoralties in this region. These historical circumstances were certainly not present in most southern states. Even without the three Florida cities, the South still had more female mayoral representation than the Northeast. And, when we look at the list of the largest 100 cities with female mayors since 2007, southern states add 6 more cities to the list (Virginia Beach, Greensboro, Charlotte, High Point, Savannah, and Knoxville), while northeastern states add only one (Syracuse). In sum, regional patterns in female mayoralties present a puzzle to conventional thinking about how political culture and electoral and governing arrangements shape opportunities and outcomes for underrepresented groups to become more fully incorporated into politics and governance. If we extend this descriptive analysis to include cities with populations over 30,000, the same basic pattern holds. However, with this larger set of cities, the gap between southern and northeastern cities narrows considerably. According to the CAWP factsheets, in 2013, 49 of the 1,341 cities with populations over 30,000 were located in southern states, compared to 43 in northeastern states and 49 in midwestern states.37 The West continues to dominate with 100 cities. Of the 38 states with at least one female mayor in cities with populations over 30,000, California had the largest number in 2013 (55) followed by Florida (21), Texas (14), Illinois (11), Massachusetts (10), and New York (8). Nine states had only one female mayor in office in 2013 (Alabama, Iowa, Louisiana, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Nevada, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, and Wyoming), and the remaining 23 states had between two and seven female mayors in 2013.38 Apart from geographic location and city size, no other information about female mayors is systematically compiled for this larger set of cities. For more details, we are limited to the largest U.S. cities (typically, those with populations over 100,000 or 150,000). Among these cities, historic information compiled by Weatherford indicates that female mayors have

Chapter 4   Governing Factional Polities in America’s Urban Centers   245

been overwhelmingly represented by the Democratic Party. For example, 78 percent (29 of 37) of first female mayors to hold office in cities with populations over 150,000 were Democrats; only 8 were Republicans. In addition, the majority of these female mayors had held other elective offices prior to becoming mayor. A majority of these mayors (20 of 37) served on city councils prior to assuming the mayor’s office. Despite the absence of data or studies on female office holding in mediumand smaller-sized cities, there is a tendency to generalize the descriptive patterns for large cities to these cities as well. However, there are reasons to believe that office-holding patterns across the two sets of cities vary, particularly in light of studies that point to the importance of the prestige of the office, electoral arrangements, and the presence of effective women’s groups and female role models. In addition, there is widespread acceptance in the literature that the incidence of female mayors is higher in small- and medium-sized cities and towns compared to large cities. Presumably this is based on hypothesized relationships between population size and the likelihood of female office holding since few studies include data to make such comparisons.39 More generally, data on mayoral office holding for small- and medium-sized cities simply do not exist. Though many studies point to a decline in the number and/or proportion of female mayors over time, this trend is weak even for large cities.40 As Table 3.1 reports, among the 100 largest cities, although there is fluctuation in the number of female mayors in office over time, no real trend is evident. On the other hand, when it comes to the number of female mayors in

TABLE 3.1  Incidence of Female Mayors over Time for Large U.S. Cities Year

100 Largest cities

Population 100,000+

Population 30,000+

2013

12

40 (14.2%)

242 (18%)

2012

12

44 (17.6%)

217 (17.4%)

2010

7

33 (13.3%)

202 (17.5%)

2008

11

36 (15.2%)

182 (16.2%)

2006

12

35 (14.4%)

197 (17.3%)

2004

14

37 (15.2%)

188 (17%)

2002

15

39 (15.9%)

206 (20.8%)

1999

13

44 (19%)

209 (21.2%)

1997

12

N/a

202 (20.7%)

Source: CAWP Annual Factsheets, http://www.cawp.rutgers.edu/fast_facts/resources/ FactSheetArchive.php.

246  PART II   The Challenges of Governing the Divided Metropolis cities with populations over 30,000, the trend is increasing rather than decreasing. Because the number of cities in this category is also increasing, as a proportion, female mayors have remained relatively stable with a slight decline in the 2000s. A similar pattern holds for cities with populations over 100,000.

Texas Case Study As it is in many other states, women continue to be underrepresented in elected offices in Texas. For example, Texas ranked 32nd in 2014 with regard to women’s proportional representation in state legislatures.41 However, Texas is also home to 2 of the 35 women who have held the governor’s office—Miriam “Ma” Ferguson (1925-27; 1933-35) and Ann Richards (1991-95)42—and three-term U.S. senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson (1993-2013). According to research on gender role models, the presence of these women in prominent political offices may positively impact the emergence of female candidates in Texas, while at the same time chip away at gender stereotypes that have traditionally made it difficult for voters to support women candidates. The purpose of this case study is to provide a systematic look at women’s representation in the mayor’s office in Texas. While Texas is well represented on the list of major U.S. cities to have elected female mayors, as it is with most states, little if anything is known about the more general patterns and trends in women mayoralties. With some 1,200 municipalities, studying local office holding in Texas is a major undertaking. Data on women’s local office holding have never been systematically compiled in Texas, so very little is known about how many women have served as mayors, when they began to be elected to this office, how many terms they typically serve, or in what kinds of cities they typically govern. In the fall of 2013, the author and a team of Rice University undergraduates began this data collection effort. Using the annual Texas State Directories, we created a list of all potential female mayors, starting with a sample of 25 directories. The directories, which were first published in 1935, originally listed only the state officials and employees; however, over time the data collection expanded to include all elected officials in federal offices, county and city elected officials, and boards and commissions as well. The data set begins with 1957, the first volume available in Rice’s Fondren Library holdings, and ends in 2012. Data entry was prioritized for early years in particular so we could identify as many first time female mayors as possible. From the 25 directories, names were collected, coded, and verified with female mayors for 18 name lists. Thus, the analysis on which this case study is based includes a time series with 18 data points, spanning 1957-2012. Our coding process involved multiple students who coded names they believed were definitely female (e.g., Ann, Lisa, Mrs. Johnson, names with

Chapter 4   Governing Factional Polities in America’s Urban Centers   247

Mrs. or Ms., etc.) and definitely male (e.g., John, Matthew, Paul, names with Jr. or II, etc.). Any name that was unfamiliar was flagged, as were genderneutral names like Pat, Chris, and Leslie. I checked each of these lists for agreement and added or removed names from the flagged list accordingly. The complete list of flagged names (N = 308) was checked in an effort to positively identify the gender of the mayor in question. We did this by searching newspapers, government records (birth, death, and marriage certificates), archival records and, in some cases, contacting city clerks or community librarians. In 16 cases, we were not able to positively identify the gender of a mayor on our flagged list. These cases were omitted from the analysis. In order to investigate the potential differences in cities with and without female mayors, place-level census data from 1980, 1990, 2000, and 2010 were merged to the female mayor time-series data. These dates are used for the analysis below that begins by looking at the trend in female mayors over time, comparing the total number of women elected to the mayor’s office (Figure 3.1) and the percentage of cities with female mayors (Figure 3.2) for the years included in the time series. As the data in Figure 3.1 reveal, there was very little change in the number of female mayors until the mid-1970s. Between 1957, the first year we began collecting data, and 1971, the average number of female mayors was only 4. Between 1973 and 1979, the average jumped to 35. From there, the number of female mayors doubled in both the 1980s and 1990s, with averages of 73 and 134, respectively. By 2012, the last year in our time series, the number of female mayors in Texas had reached 204. Figure 3.2 reports the number of female mayors as a percentage of all mayors in Texas municipalities (N = 1,207) over the same time period. As these data show, women have and continue to be significantly underrepresented in the mayor’s

FIGURE 3.1 Total Female Mayors in Texas, 1957–2012 Sources: Texas State Directories, various years.

248  PART II   The Challenges of Governing the Divided Metropolis

FIGURE 3.2  Percent Texas Municipalities with Female Mayors, 1957–2012 Source: Texas State Directories, various years.

office in Texas. Indeed, the highest percentage of female mayors, 17, was achieved in 2012, which means that women were less represented in the mayor’s office than they were in the Texas state legislature during this year (21 %). At the same time, this puts Texas ahead of the three other states for which comparable statistics were found—Utah (7%), Indiana (9.2%), and New Jersey (14%).43 While women’s mayoral representation in any given year has, and continues to be, quite low, when we consider the total number of Texas municipalities with female mayors we get a much more encouraging picture. Based on the data compiled here, 635 of the 1,207 municipalities in Texas (54.6%) had elected a woman at some point between 1957 and 2012. Out of the 18 time points in this study, the maximum number of years recorded was 10. And, among municipalities that have elected women mayors, 22 percent appeared only once in my data, while 15 percent appeared twice. The remaining 7 percent were present in 3 to 10 of the 18 years of the time-series. Historically, women gained access to the mayor’s office earlier and in greater numbers in small towns compared to big cities.44 To what extent was this true in Texas, and does this pattern still exist today? While the data for the present analysis do not allow for identification or verification of the timing or location of the first women mayors elected in Texas, the extremely low numbers recorded in the state directories from the 1950s confirm that women were not regular officeholders even during this decade. Of the first four women included in my data set, each in office in 1957, two held office in small towns and two governed in solidly middle-sized cities. Extending the list of first-time women mayors a bit further into the future, we see a larger incidence of small-town mayors. For the years included in the data set, no medium or large cities are represented in the 1960s (see Table 3.2). Of course, the predominance of small-town female mayors in these early years does not necessarily mean that women were more underrepresented in

Chapter 4   Governing Factional Polities in America’s Urban Centers   249

TABLE 3.2 Incidence of First Female Mayors in Texas by Municipal Populations, 1957–67 Municipality

Population*

Mayor

Year

Alice

16,449

Mrs. Bette Jo Harper

1957

Ardis Heights**

N/a

Mrs. L. H. Cobbs

1957

Raymondville city

9,136

Mrs. Mary C. Frost

1957

Richland town

308

Mrs. Clyde Anderson

1957

Toyah town

294

Mrs. A. B. Tinnin

1959

Graford city

448

Mrs. Levi Jenkins

1965

Tioga town

403

Margaret C. Young

1965

Anthony town

1,300

Carroll J. McCleary

1967

Beach City

200

Mrs. Eloice Jordan

1967

Palmhurst city

200

Mrs. LaRoy Rossow

1967

West Lake Hills

1,125

Mrs. H. Jacobsen

1967

Source: Texas State Directories, various years. *Note: population is based on year listed and comes from the State Directories, not the Census. **Note: Ardis Heights was annexed by the city of Greenville in 1959. In 2008 its population was 214 (city-data.com).

medium- and large-sized Texas cities. Although big cities tend to get most of the attention, in the U.S. and especially in Texas, they represent only a tiny fraction of municipalities. Indeed, more than half of all municipalities in Texas had populations less than 1,500 in 1980, and more than three-quarters had fewer than 5,000 residents. Thus, we would expect the majority of female mayors to come from small towns and cities. But how do women fare when it comes to medium- and large-sized cities, and does their representation in Texas vary according to city or town size? In Table 3.3, I report the percentage of women mayors by municipal population size based on five categories. The first two categories denote small towns; the second two, medium-sized towns and cities; and the last category, the largest cities in Texas. As these data show, it is the case that women in Texas are best represented in the mayors’ offices in the smallest towns, but only slightly. Apart from the 1970s, women achieved the greatest proportional representation in towns with less than 1,000 residents for each of the subsequent decades. At the same time, it is not the case that women are least represented in the biggest cities. In fact, for each decade except 2012, women achieved the second-highest rates of proportional representation in cities with populations over 30,000. The difference in representation across the smallest and largest municipalities

250  PART II   The Challenges of Governing the Divided Metropolis TABLE 3.3 Percent Female Mayors by Municipal Population Size Year

.00), and indeed are likely to be part of a larger constellation of variables defining the character local environmentalism or the lack thereof. Our analysis here is focused simply on adding to an understanding of how local interest groups seem to factor into the policy processes associated with the development of commitment to environmental protection and local policy decisions to protect the environment. At the same time, such policymaking does not take place in a cocoon where only environmental groups interact with city officials. Cities continue to be concerned with growing their economies and at least some environmental policies may not be seen by city officials as business friendly. Even in this postindustrial era, with most heavy manufacturing having departed cities, urban policymakers believe that it is critical to foster a climate that at the very least is not seen as hostile to business.

Chapter 5   Urban Resilience, Sustainability, and Climate Change   317

Likewise, there is business advocacy to compete with lobbying by environmental groups. Business leadership is vital to the overall civic fabric of cities and these individuals clearly have access to those in power (Berry & Portney, 2012). At the same time, business leadership in the central city has been depleted by not only the decline of manufacturing but by globalization of business and migration of business to suburbs and exurbs (Hanson, Wolman, Connolly, Pearson, & McMannon, 2010). Cities all say they balance the needs of business with the quality of life within their borders. But this is convenient rhetoric and empirical tests are necessary to determine just how cities handle the competing demands for both its business community and environmental advocates.

Research Design and Findings Here, we present a relatively simple model. Our dependent variables represent measures of city commitment to environmental protection. Our key independent variable is a measure of the incorporation of environmental nonprofit organizations into the local policymaking process. We assess this relationship controlling for several possible powerful alternative, or spurious, explanations. These explanations focus on the political ideology of city officials, the propensity of the city electorate to vote for Democrats in presidential elections, and the level of personal income of the residents of the city. Each of these variables and their measures will be described below. The data on which this analysis is based come from a 2009 survey of local officials and advocates in 50 of the largest 54 cities in the United States. The four largest cities, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Houston, were excluded from the survey because the challenges presented by their scale. The 50 surveyed cities have 2007 population sizes ranging from 1.5 million in Phoenix to 336,000 in Tampa. In other words, these cities represent the entire universe of U.S. cities in this population range. Between June and August of 2009, questionnaires were mailed to all city councilors or commissioners, a relatively large subset of city agency administrators, and to a selected set of representatives of advocacy organizations in each of these cities.1 We used a multimodal approach, offering subjects the choice of filling out a paper questionnaire they received in the mail or going to a website and answering the same questions online. Follow-up prompts to initial nonrespondents took the form of personalized emails and specified the hot-linked URL for the website. The project also involved identifying and surveying an average of about 18 city administrators in each city, and the responses from these administrators are used in this article. The administrators we targeted were all leading officials at the heads of departments or bureaus with some relevance to environmental affairs or economic development. Titles of such offices and the

318  PART II   The Challenges of Governing the Divided Metropolis organization of responsibilities differed from city to city. Generally, though, we identified those working in areas such as environmental protection, sustainability, public works, parks and recreation, public utilities, water and wastewater management, office of the city manager, economic development, and planning. Questionnaires were mailed to this entire population of 885 city administrators, and 413 responded. Thirty-seven of these questionnaires were returned as “undeliverable,” and we were not able to locate appropriate replacement administrators. The adjusted response rate was thus 48.7%.2 The average number of administrator responses across all included cities is 8.5. Dependent Variables The primary dependent variable in this analysis is an attitudinal measure of how committed the city is to the environment, and is derived from a survey question asked of city administrators. The question asked administrators to reveal how committed they perceived the city to be to environmental protection using a 5-point scale. The specific question wording was: Cities also vary considerably in their commitment to environmental protection. In your own estimation, how would you evaluate your local government’s commitment to improving the natural environment of the city?

Level of commitment to environmental protection None

Low

Moderate

High

Very High

1

2

3

4

5

Table 1 provides the frequency distribution of the answers to this question for all respondents. Nearly 70% of all administrators reported that their cities have “high” or “very high” commitment to environmental protection. The question here, of course, is whether lower levels of commitment are found in cities without much in the way of nonprofit environmental groups. In addition to this attitudinal measure of commitment to environmental protection, we also include a measure of how aggressive the city has been in enacting and implementing specific environmental policies and programs. Presumably, a city that has enacted a relatively large number of environmental programs has made a stronger and more significant commitment to environmental protection than a city that has enacted fewer. Here, the focus is on how many of some 23 different environmental programs and policies each city has enacted and implemented. This includes programs on public transit, high occupancy vehicles, limits on downtown

Chapter 5   Urban Resilience, Sustainability, and Climate Change   319

TABLE 1 Frequency Distribution of City Administrators’ Reports of City Commitment to Environmental Protection Response category

Number of administrator responses

Percentage of responses

No commitment

0

0.0

Low commitment

23

5.6

Moderate commitment

101

24.6

High commitment

168

40.9

Very high commitment

119

29.0

Total

411

100.0

Summary statistics

Mean response = 3.93; SD = 0.87

parking spaces, alternatively fueled city vehicles, bicycle ridership, household solid and hazardous waste recycling, industrial hazardous waste recycling, eco-industrial park development, air emissions control (including climate action programs), purchasing recycled products, superfund or brownfield site redevelopment, lead and asbestos abatement, community gardens (sustainable agriculture), pesticide reduction, green building, green affordable housing, city purchase of renewable energy, city energy conservation (including use of federal Energy Efficiency and Conservation Block Grant funds for city building retro-fits), alternative energy for residential customers, and water conservation. The inclusion of a dependent variable measuring this aspect of local environmental policies is meant to capture actions, not just attitudes. As discussed later, the two variables—attitudes of local officials and actual environmental policies—are closely correlated.

Independent Variable The key independent variable in this analysis focuses on the role of nonprofit environmental groups in policymaking. Our broader analysis sought to help establish the role of a variety of different types of groups and organizations, including business associations and businesses, labor unions, neighborhood associations, and others. The question posed to city administrators to get a sense of the role of these groups was as follows: Which of these sectors are most likely to be included in informal bargaining and negotiation with city officials? On issues involving both economic development and environmental concerns, what is the likelihood that you and your colleagues would include these sectors in your policymaking deliberations?

320  PART II   The Challenges of Governing the Divided Metropolis Independent Variable Very likely to include

Maybe/ maybe Not

Not very likely to include

Don’t know

Business associations

----

----

----

----

Environmental groups

----

----

----

----

Nonprofit other than environmental

----

----

----

----

Church or faith-based

----

----

----

----

Specific corporations/ businesses

----

----

----

----

Labor unions

----

----

----

----

Neighborhood associations

----

----

----

----

Other city governments

----

----

----

----

Council of governments or metropolitan planning organization

----

----

----

----

Regional development organization

----

----

----

----

Our analysis focuses on the second type of group in the list—environmental groups. Among all of the types of groups listed, environmental groups would seem to be most likely to be strong advocates of environmental protection. Thus, we would expect when policy decisions are “very likely to include” environmental groups, city governments are likely to exhibit high levels of commitment to the environment, and to enact policies and programs designed to protect and improve the environment. Empirically, the issue is whether there is a relationship, and if so, how strong is it.

Control Variables Even if there is a reasonably strong correlation between attitudinal commitment and the incorporation of environment interest groups, this relationship could very well have alternative explanations. Here, we focus on three such alternatives. First, the political ideology of local officials could independently explain why some cities are willing to incorporate environmental groups into policy deliberations, and why local officials would be willing to adopt environmental protection policies. To control for this possibility, and the

Chapter 5   Urban Resilience, Sustainability, and Climate Change   321

possibility that it is only ideologically liberal cities that pave the way for inclusion of environmental groups, we rely on another question from the surveys of city administrators, this one asking respondents to act as informants to provide their assessments of how politically “liberal” or “conservative” local officials are.3 The specific question was as follows: How would you describe the political views of those who work for city government? Are they predominantly liberal? Conservative? Moderate? On a scale where 1 indicates very liberal political views, 4 represents a moderate position, and 7 represents very conservative political views, where would you place the following: Control Variables Please circle Very liberal

Moderate

Very conservative

Most administrators

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

Most city councilors/ commissioners

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

The Mayor

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

The analysis here focuses on administrators reports of the political ideology of city councilors or commissioners, the chief legislative policymakers of the city. Administrators were asked to provide this assessment using a 7-point scale. The expectation here is that cities with larger numbers of politically conservative councilors or commissioners will be less likely to be committed to sustainability since environmental protection is often seen by conservative policymakers as impeding economic growth and development. The intent here, however, is to examine whether and to what extent the activity of local environmental interest groups seems to be related to environmental commitment and policies independent of the ideology of the policymakers. If environmental interest groups matter, per se, the relationship with environmental commitment and policy should persist even when the ideology of local policymakers is controlled. In other words, our expectation is that interaction between environmental groups and policymakers is capable of influencing commitment to environmental protection even in relatively moderate and conservative cities. The second potential alternative explanation focuses on the character of the local electorate. Using information about the average level of support of the voters in each city for the Democrat candidate for President across

322  PART II   The Challenges of Governing the Divided Metropolis the 1996, 2000, and 2004 elections provides a sense of how “Democrat” the electorate is. Presumably, cities that have larger Democrat proportions of the electorate would be able to be more committed to environmental protection than cities with smaller proportion Democrats. We use presidential elections because doing so allows us to know the party of the vote (which is not usually possible if local elections happen to be nonpartisan), and ensures that the measurement is done at the same points in time, which would be problematic with local elections that may be held at various times of any given year. The third alternative explanation focuses on the resource base of the city, particularly the level of personal income of the residents. Although previous studies have not universally found a correlation between environmental protection policies and the level of personal income, the idea that those with higher incomes are more likely to be environmentally conscientious persists. Moreover, theoretically at least, there is an expectation that income (as a measure of the level of economic development) presents a nonlinear “environmental Kuznets curve” relationship with the pursuit of environmental policies and programs (Kahn, 2006). Since we are not interested specifically in the exact shape of the relationship here, but rather simply wish to use income as a control variable, the measure employed here is the log of median family income as reported in the 2000 U.S. Census.

Unit of Analysis The survey data are measured for individual respondents. Yet, the appropriate unit of analysis for the central hypothesis is not the individual person, but rather the city. For this analysis, we use the survey questions to measure the variables as aggregate summary responses at the city level.4 The administrators’ responses to the question about commitment of the city to environmental protection are used to characterize the city as a whole. Here, we use the survey data to compute the percentage of administrators reporting that the commitment is “high” or “very high.” The key independent variable, based on responses to the question about incorporation of environmental groups, measures the percentage of administrators who reported inclusion of environmental groups as “very likely.” And the political ideology control variable represents the percentage of administrators reporting that most city councilors or commissioners are liberal or very liberal (Categories 1 and 2 combined).

Findings Is the level of commitment to environmental protection related to incorporation of environmental groups in policy deliberations? Figures 1 and 2 show the bivariate scatterplots of the relationship between inclusion of environmental groups and the two dependent variables. These graphs demonstrate that there

Chapter 5   Urban Resilience, Sustainability, and Climate Change   323

is a fairly strong positive relationship where greater inclusion of environmental groups in policy deliberations is associated with greater commitment to environmental protection, both in terms of the reported commitment and the number of environmental protection programs enacted and implemented. But how well do these relationships seem to hold up when the partisan, economic, and political ideological context of the city is considered? Table 2 provides an OLS regression analysis5 in an effort to isolate the effects of environmental group inclusion. The patterns are very similar for both dependent variables. Even controlling for family income, the political ideology of public officials, and the tendency for the local electorate to vote for Democrats in presidential elections, inclusion of environmental groups is still significantly related to commitment to environmental protection. Clearly, the ideology of city council exerts some significant influence on how committed the city is to environmental protection, even if Democrat voting and family income do not. What is more striking is that the influence of inclusion of environmental groups, at least as reported by city administrators, Denver

Percent Administrators Reporting Commitment to the Environment “High” or “Very high”

100.00

80.00

60.00 Detroit

40.00

Santa Ana

Seattle

Tucson Oakland Portland Austin San Francisco Minneapolis San Jose Honolulu CDP Dallas Boston Tampa Sacramento Washington Raleigh Baltimore Nashville-Davidson Virginia Beach Arlington Miami Jacksonville Louisville metro Long Beach Columbus Charlotte St. Louis PhoenixPhiladelphia San Diego San Antonio Fort Worth Las Vegas Cleveland maha Fresno Milwaukee Atlanta Tulsa Kansas City El Paso Oklahoma City

Albuquerque

Mesa

20.00

Colorado Springs

Indianapolis

Wichita

.00 .00

20.00

40.00

60.00

80.00

100.00

Percent Administrators Reporting Inclusion of Environmental Groups “Very Likely”

FIGURE 1  Scatterplot of the relationship between “very likely” inclusion of environmental groups and level of commitment to environmental protection, as reported by city administrators Percent commitment to environmental protection = 43.5  + 0.544  (% inclusion of environmental groups “very likely”). R2 = .255, significance = .000

Number of Public Environmental Protection Programs

324  PART II   The Challenges of Governing the Divided Metropolis 25.00

San Francisco Oakland

Seattle Columbus

Sacramento

Denver

20.00

Minneapolis

Phoenix San Diego Albuquerque

Kansas City Las Vegas

Nashville-Davidson

10.00

San Jose Boston

Philadelphia

Fresno

15.00

Portland Washington

Miami

Indianapolis

Charlotte Tucson AustinBaltimore Raleigh Honolulu CDP

San Antonio Atlanta

Mesa Cleveland Dallas Milwaukee Louisville metro Jacksonville Fort Worth El Paso Long Beach maha Colorado Springs Arlington Virginia Beach Oklahoma City Detroit St. Louis Tampa Tulsa Santa Ana

Wichita

5.00 .00

20.00

40.00

60.00

80.00

100.00

Percent Administrators Reporting Inclusion of Environmental Groups “Very Likely”

FIGURE 2  Scatterplot of the relationship between “very likely” inclusion of environmental groups and number of city environmental protection policies and programs Number of environmental programs and policies = 10.5  + 0.104  (% inclusion of environmental groups “very likely”). R2 = .243, significance = .000

persists even controlling for these potential spurious factors. The implication of these findings is that it is not just cities with very liberal city policymakers where there is high commitment to environmental protection and aggressive local environmental protection policies. Cities where environmental groups are included in policy deliberations seem to have a stronger commitment to environmental protection even controlling for how liberal or conservative their respective policymakers are. Stated another way, it does not seem to be the case that environmental groups affect commitment to environmental protection and policies only when city policymakers are liberal. Our data show that environmental groups have ample access to city policymakers. Even in cities where politics tilts toward the right on national issues, environmental organizations demonstrate significant interaction with city officials. This contact is ongoing and the relationship between inclusion and the robustness of policies and programs aimed at protecting the environment seems to be a strong one.

Chapter 5   Urban Resilience, Sustainability, and Climate Change   325

TABLE 2 OLS Regression Analysis of Commitment to Environmental Protection Dependent Variables Percent of administrators reporting commitment to environmental protection “High” or “Very High”

Number of local environmental protection policies and programs

Variable

ß

SE

Significance

ß

SE

Significance

Inclusion of environmental groups

.313

.134

.024

.052

.025

.046

Percent of city council/ commission that is “Liberal” or “Very Liberal”

.237

.105

.029

.054

.020

.010

Average percent democrat vote, 1996, 2000, 2004

.258

.233

.274

.043

.044

.331

Median family income, 2000 (log)

.000

.000

.217

.0000092

.000

.096

Constant

11.64

19.76

.559

3.59

3.75

.343

R2

.466

.499

Significance

.000

.000

“Very Likely”

Business Influence The apparent strength of environmental advocacy raises an obvious question: What of business influence? A traditional view of business and environmentalists in city politics is that their respective interests can be antagonistic. Business may want to expand wherever it wants in the city and utilize manufacturing processes that create externalities harmful to the environment. Environmental groups may be opposed to such objectives, placing quality of life concerns ahead of the city’s economic prosperity. In areas where such interests clash, scholars have long held that business has an overwhelming advantage. Cities need jobs to grow while business has a choice of where to locate. If a city

326  PART II   The Challenges of Governing the Divided Metropolis seems inhospitable, a business can move across that city’s boundaries to a more accommodating suburb (Peterson, 1981). Skepticism about the strength of environmentalism also arises from a more fundamental argument about the role of business in the city. Simply put, business is commonly viewed as an intrinsic part of the ruling coalition of the city. In this sense, the influence of business derives not simply from corporations lobbying for this policy or that development project, but from ongoing relationships with city policymakers. For business leaders, the door to city hall is always open (Lindblom, 1977). What we might call the business dominant model of interest group politics is illustrated by Clarence Stone’s well known study of Atlanta. Stone documents how different mayors of Atlanta all depended on business as an integral part of their governing coalition. The mayors needed business leaders to get things done; city government was not powerful enough by itself to move the city forward (Stone, 1989). Our data sets allow us to test the supposition that business may be the underlying force in city politics (Berry & Portney, 2012). By taking business into account, the positive relationship between inclusion of environmental groups and the number of environmental programs might be considerably weaker than we have shown here or could even be spurious altogether. To test this possibility, we employ a regression analysis and utilize variables for both inclusion of environmental groups and inclusion of business groups by administrators, as shown in Table 3. When we control for the percent of administrators who report business inclusion, we find that inclusion of environmental groups is significantly related to the number of sustainability programs. However, when we control for the inclusion of environmental groups, inclusion of business is unrelated to cities’ pursuit of sustainability and environmental protection. What is perhaps most notable about these results is that the coefficient for business inclusion is not negative. This implies that business advocacy and inclusion does not take the form of opposition to environmental protection policies and programs. Business groups may not enthusiastically advocate for environmental protection, but neither do they impede the adoption of such policies. In short, these results suggest that environmental advocacy is a powerful force in city politics. Why is this so? A beginning point is that interest group scholarship has not caught up with the profound economic and demographic changes in cities. The business dominant model is built around the notion of a set of large-scale businesses headquartered in the central city. The leaders of these firms use their access to city hall to not only lobby for what their firms need but they also provide civic leadership aimed at keeping the city attractive for both residents and prospective businesses. For many cities, however, business’s footprint within their borders has shrunk markedly. Today there is

Chapter 5   Urban Resilience, Sustainability, and Climate Change   327

TABLE 3 Regression Results Showing the Relative Importance of Business Advocacy and Environmental Advocacy in Adoption and Implementation of Local Environmental Policies Independent Variables

ß

Beta

SE

Significance

Inclusion of business deliberations*

.153

.015

1.35

.911

Inclusion of environmental groups in deliberations**

.100

.455

.029

.002

Constant

10.60

--

1.67

.000

R2

.210

Significance

.005

Dependent variable = Number of local environmental programs; n = 49 cities * A dummy variable coded “1” if 100% of administrator respondents reported that business is “very likely” to be included in deliberations, and “0” if less than 100% of respondents reported business is “very likely” to be included. ** Percent of administrator respondents who reported that environmental groups would be “very likely” included in deliberations.

only a single Fortune 100 firm (Liberty Mutual) based in the city of Boston (Wallack, 2012). Yet, this does not reflect a decline in the city’s economic condition as Boston is actually doing quite well. Rather, a combination of mergers, acquisitions, and globalization has depopulated the city of most of the large firms (i.e., Bank of Boston, Shawmut) that used to make the city its corporate home. The large businesses that have newly emerged in recent years have generally located in the suburbs or exurbs of the economically vibrant metropolitan area. Another aspect of the changing business population in cities is that with the decline of manufacturing many of the classic tradeoffs between business prosperity and environmental protection vanish. Cities regulate business only in certain policy areas with most regulatory responsibility overall residing with the states and the federal government. What city governments do regulate is land use and here there are still conflicts between business development projects and environmental quality of life concerns. Typically, they are not intractable and a common avenue of compromise is for developers of apartments, condominiums, office buildings, retail complexes, and the like to adopt various mitigating project characteristics to make new construction environmentally sensible.

328  PART II   The Challenges of Governing the Divided Metropolis What has not changed in city politics is the desire of government to attract new business. Cities are always interested in adding jobs and tax revenue and when economic downturns hit, such needs take on real urgency. Not all businesses, however, are equally appealing. Most desirable are firms in dynamic business sectors that will bring highly educated people into the city. As noted earlier, cities want to draw highly educated professionals who will be interested in the amenities of a vibrant, tolerant, and diverse city (Florida, 2004, 2012). In the modern city, creating programs that promote sustainability may not be seen as hostile to business expansion. Local firms may strongly endorse such initiatives, either because it adds to the appeal of the city to its employees or there are direct business benefits through the economic activity generated by new programs or projects. Looking to the future, economists Glaeser, Kolko, and Saiz (2001) advise city leaders that “the quality of life is paramount” to a city’s prospects (p. 27). None of this is to argue that business has become a minor part of the political fabric of cities. The door to city hall is still open and mayors value business leaders as part of their political coalitions, as donors to their campaigns, and as members of various advisory bodies. Public–private partnerships remain as a strategic route to achieving certain policy goals. And city hall is still interested in helping both firms within its boundaries and firms from outside the city gain access to land, tax relief, or zoning variances, if that facilitates business expansion. But such assistance is a far cry from the business dominant model. City hall is also interested in helping other constituencies and access to city councils and city administrative agencies is very high for all interest group sectors. Even small neighborhood associations have very easy access to city hall (Berry & Portney, in press). The strength of environmental groups is no illusion or statistical miscalculation. In the contemporary city, quality of life is important just as is attracting new businesses. As the American economy has continued to evolve, the antagonism in cities between business and environmental groups has softened. For their part, mayors have complicated challenges and their regimes are now far more diverse than a partnership with downtown business interests.

Conclusion Our goal here was to build on what we know about interest groups in city politics and, more specifically, to expand our understanding of the relationship between environmental advocacy and the adoption of environmental protection policies. These are interesting questions in and of themselves but they take on added significance in the context of the federal government’s inaction with respect to new policies designed to fight global climate change. The foundation of our argument is that cities have low barriers to entry and,

Chapter 5   Urban Resilience, Sustainability, and Climate Change   329

thus, it is considerably easier for environmental groups to have their voices heard. However, being heard and being effective are not the same things. Local officials can hew close to procedural openness, making sure they meet with all stakeholders as policymaking moves forward, without moving in the direction preferred by environmental advocates. We have found a robust relationship between incorporation of environmental groups into policymaking and policies aimed at moving cities forward toward sustainability. This link holds against conventional statistical controls for obvious counter-explanations. We do not wish to carry the causal inference too far, for the data we analyze are insufficient to support a firm conclusion that it is environmental interest groups, per se, that differentiate cities that are strongly committed to environmental protection from cities that are not. Plausibly this relationship could simply reflect a greater propensity of cities with ideologically progressive populations, voters, and elected officials to be more oriented toward environmental protection. However, we show that the liberalism of the city council as a predictor does not vitiate the relationship between the inclusion of environmental groups and administrators’ reports of city commitment to the environment, or the relationship between inclusion and the number of environmental protection programs. It is also plausible that the relationships we have emphasized actually reflect nothing more than cities’ economic standing. Wealthier cities would seem more likely to fund programs that are, ultimately, discretionary, and must compete against all the other claims made on tight urban budgets. This logic, however, does not survive our multivariate tests. A third control, cities’ liberalism among its population in general, based on past patterns of voting in national elections, fails to reach statistical significance as well. Finally, business advocacy does not appear to impede environmental advocacy. In the modern city, governments recognize that they must continue to promote economic development while intensifying their efforts aimed at environmental sustainability. From these results, we cannot say definitively that city policymakers enact and implement sustainability and environmental policies that they would not otherwise enact because of pressure from environmental groups. But the evidence provided here does lend support to the conclusion that commitment of local policymakers to the environment, and decisions to pursue environmental protection policies, seems to have much to do with the extent to which local environmental interest groups are included in the policymaking process.

Acknowledgements The authors would like to thank Erick Lachapelle, Hugh Ward, Xun Cao, and anonymous reviewers for their extensive comments and recommendations.

330  PART II   The Challenges of Governing the Divided Metropolis

Notes   1 The city administrator questionnaire can be found at http://ase.tufts.edu/polsci/ faculty/berry/question-admin.pdf.   2 Two or more city administrators responded in every city except Memphis, where only one administrator responded. As a result, Memphis is not included in the analysis comparing cities.   3 The distinction between ideologically liberal and ideologically conservative cities is made on the basis of consistent public opinion division on the environment. To cite just one poll question, Gallup asked a sample of Americans whether they believed news about global warming was generally exaggerated, generally correct, or generally underestimated. Fully 67% of self-described Republicans answered that such news is generally exaggerated. In contrast, only 20% of Democrats believed that. Although surveys of elites rather than rank-and-file are used here, these judgments and the inferences about ideological divisions are supported in the literature. See Lydia Saad (2012).   4 The primary disadvantage of this approach to the analysis is that it disregards variations in survey responses within cities. Yet, because the unit of analysis is the city, a method of aggregation is appropriate here.  5 Logit analysis produced identical result with respect the relative significance if each independent variable. Analysis of intercorrelations among the independent and control variables, as well as tolerance (not presented here), suggests that these models do not present a problem of multicollinearity. See Note 6 for discussion of multicollinearity when a business inclusion variable is analyzed.

References Agyeman, J., & Evans, B. (1995). Sustainability and democracy: Community participation in local agenda 21. Local Government Policy Making, 22, 35-40. AtKisson, A. (1999). Developing indicators of sustainable community: Lessons from sustainable Seattle. In D. Satterwaite (Ed.), The Earthscan reader in sustainable cities (pp. 352-363). London, England: Earthscan Publications. Berry, J. M. (2010). Urban interest groups. In L. S. Maisel & J. M. Berry (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of American political parties and interest groups (pp. 502- 515). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Berry, J. M., & Portney, K. E. (2012, September). Interest group participation in city politics. Paper delivered at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, New Orleans, LA. Berry, J. M. and Portney, K. E. (in press). Nonprofit Advocacy in City Politics. In Robert Pekkanen, Steven R. Smith, and Y. Tsukinaka (Eds). Nonprofits and Advocacy. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Berry, J. M., & Wilcox, C. (2009). The interest group society (5th ed.). New York, NY: Pearson Longman. Brody, S. D., Zahran, S., Grover, H., & Vedlitz, A. (2008). A spatial analysis of local climate change policy in the United States: Risk, stress, and opportunity. Landscape and Urban Planning, 87, 33-41.

Chapter 5   Urban Resilience, Sustainability, and Climate Change   331 Fitzgerald, J. (2010). Emerald cities: Urban sustainability and economic development. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Florida, R. (2004). Cities and the creative class. New York, NY: Routledge. Florida, R. (2012). The rise of the creative class: Revisited. New York, NY: Basic Books. Glaeser, E., Kolko, J., & Saiz, A. (2001). Consumer city. Journal of Economic Geography, 1, 27-50. Golub, A., & Henderson, J. (2011). The greening of mobility in San Francisco. In M. Slavin (Ed.), Sustainability in America’s cities: Creating the green metropolis (pp. 113-132). Washington, DC: Island Press. Greenwood, D., & Holt, R. (2010). Local economic development in the 21st century: Quality of life and sustainability. New York, NY: M.E. Sharpe. Hanson, R., Wolman, H., Connolly, D., Pearson, K., & McMannon, R. (2010). Corporate citizenship and urban problem solving: The changing civic role of business leaders in American cities. Journal of Urban Affairs, 32, 1-23. Iglitzin, L. B. (1995). The Seattle commons: A case study of the politics and planning of an urban village. Policy Studies Journal, 23, 620-633. Kahn, M. E. (2006). Green cities: Urban growth and the environment. Washington, DC Brookings Institution Press. Leo, C. (1998). Regional growth management regime: The case of Portland, Oregon. Journal of Urban Affairs, 20, 363-394. Lindblom, C. E. (1977). Politics and markets. New York, NY: Basic Books. Lubell, M., Feiock, R., & Handy, S. (2006). City adoption of environmentally sustainable policies in California’s central valley. Journal of the American Planning Association, 75, 293-308. Milbrath, L. (1984). Environmentalists: Vanguard for a new society. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. National Center for Charitable Statistics. (2012). Number of nonprofit organizations in the United States, 1999-2009. Retrieved from http://nccsdataweb.urban.org/PubApps/ profile1.php Newman, P., & Jennings, I. (2008). Cities as sustainable ecosystems. Washington, DC: Island Press. O’Connell, L. (2009). The impact of local supporters on smart growth policy adoption. Journal of the American Planning Association, 75, 281-291. Peterson, P. E. (1981). City limits. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Portney, K. E. (2007). Local business and environmental policies in cities. In M. Kraft & S. Kamieniecki (Eds.), Business and environmental policy: Corporate interests in the American political system (pp. 299-326). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Portney, K. E. (2013). Taking sustainable cities seriously: Economic development, the environment, and quality of life in American cities (2nd ed.). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Saad, L. (2012, March 30). “In U.S., global warming views steady despite warm winter,” Gallup.com. Retrieved form http://www.gallup.com/poll/153608/Global-WarmingViews-Steady-Despite-Warm-Winter.aspx Siemens Corporation. (2011). U.S. and Canada green city index: Assessing the environmental performance of 27 major US and Canadian cities. Retrieved from http://www.siemens.com/entry/cc/features/greencityindex_international/all/en/pdf/ report_northamerica_en.pdf

332  PART II   The Challenges of Governing the Divided Metropolis Slavin, M., & Snyder, K. (2011). Strategic climate action planning in Portland. In M. Slavin (Ed.), Sustainability in America’s cities: Creating the green metropolis (pp. 21-44). Washington, DC: Island Press. Stone, C. N. (1989). Regime politics. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. Tiebout, C. M. (1956). “A pure theory of local expenditures.” Journal of Political Economy, 64, 416-424. United Nations Environmental Programme. (2000). Agenda 21. New York, NY: United Nations. Retrieved from http://www.unep.org/Documents/Default. asp?DocumentID=52 U.S. Conference of Mayors. (2008). U.S. metro economies: Current and potential green jobs in the U.S. economy (Report from the U.S. Conference of Mayors). Retrieved from http://www.usmayors.org/climateprotection/documents/Green%20Jobs%20 FINAL.pdf Wallack, T. (2012, September 5). More charity at home. Boston Globe. Waste, R. (1989). The ecology of city policymaking. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. World Commission on Environment and Development—Brundtland Commission Report. (1987). Our common future. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Zahran, S., Brody, S. D., Vedlitz, A., Grover, H., & Miller, C. (2008). Vulnerability and capacity: Explaining local commitment to climate-change policy. Environmental and Planning C: Government and Policy, 26, 544-562.

CHAPTER 6 Governance, Gentrification, and Neighborhoods Editors’ Introduction Our cities are undergoing profound changes. We see a movement of the middle- and upper-class residents back to our cities, causing great social changes in certain neighborhoods. In Selection 19, Margaret Kohn approaches the phenomenon of gentrification through a normative framework, exploring its profound complexity, and arguing that gentrification is neither merely a negative nor a positive phenomenon for urban residents and their neighborhoods. In examining the normative arguments attached to gentrification’s multiple consequences, such as neighborhood change, potential displacement, transformation of spaces, social polarization, and the “social mix” versus neighborhood homogeneity, she explores gentrification from both a libertarian and an egalitarian perspective. Kohn concludes that gentrification itself does not present the core of the problem but can rather be seen as a consequence of a much more vexing issue: inequality. Therefore, solving or remedying the issue of inequality may be the key to addressing gentrification. Urban scholars like to write a great deal about social injustice. But what are their own roles as urban residents in these processes? Arguably, many urbanists may be gentrifiers themselves. In examining their own roles as gentrifiers, John Joe Schlichtman and Jason Patch provide a more microperspective on gentrification and neighborhood change. In Selection 20, they both tell their own stories as residents of different urban neighborhoods over the course of their lives. Over time, they take on different roles and witness stages of the gentrification process. As urban researchers who are DOI: 10.4324/9781315163635-8333

334  PART II   The Challenges of Governing the Divided Metropolis deeply aware of the processes that spark neighborhood change and can cause displacement, they try to critically analyze their own contributions to that process—as young students, as newlyweds, and as more settled homeowners. In the process, they explain how their own preferences (and possibly their own awareness as urbanists) had an impact on their choices, as well as their impact on their urban communities. Their honest reflections invite the readers themselves to wonder how their choices may have (and will in the future) impacted their neighborhoods and communities.

19 What Is Wrong with Gentrification? Margaret Kohn* In April 2010, David Hulchanski released an update to his influential study ‘The Three Cities Within Toronto: Income Polarization Among Toronto’s Neighbourhoods, 1970–2000.’ The report vividly documented the spatial dimension of the increasing income inequality in the region. In the period from 1970 to 2006, 20% of Toronto neighborhoods saw dramatic increases in prosperity while 40% saw significant declines. North central Toronto consolidated its status as an elite enclave while the inner suburbs of Scarborough and parts of North York have been transformed from middle-class neighborhoods to low-income areas. Downtown Toronto also experienced a dramatic transformation during this period, as primarily working-class neighborhoods gentrified, creating a patchwork of wealthy, middle-income, and poor neighborhoods. Similar changes have been taking place in cities across North America. The article poses the question: what is wrong with gentrification? The methods employed are conceptual and normative rather than empirical. The conceptual component of the paper examines the literature on gentrification and identifies five harms associated with gentrification: residential displacement; exclusion; transformation of public, social and commercial space; polarization; and homogenization. This typology can help empirical researchers and policy-makers assess the harm of gentrification is a more systematic way. The main contribution, however, is normative analysis. This article asks whether these changes should indeed be construed as harmful * ‘What is wrong with gentrification?’, Margaret Kohn, Urban Research & Practice, 6.3, pp. 297-310, 2013, Taylor & Francis, reprinted by permission of the publisher (Taylor & Francis Ltd, http://www.tandfonline.com).

Chapter 6   Governance, Gentrification, and Neighborhoods   335

and if so, whether they are the types of harms that can be remedied through public policies. In the existing literature, harm or injustice is often assumed but not explained or defended. Implicit in the critique of gentrification is the claim that justice requires that poor people should have access to high-cost housing but not necessarily to other luxury goods. This position initially appears contradictory or counterintuitive; by introducing the distinction between displacement and replacement, I defend this principle, at least as applied to current residents. By employing the tools of normative political theory, I explain why public policy should be structured to prevent the displacement of current residents of gentrifying neighborhoods. Some commentators have pointed out that the recent shift in the academic literature from harsh criticism to enthusiastic defense of gentrification is entirely predictable (Allen 2008). Many academics live in hip but gritty downtown neighborhoods (or wish they could) and they tend to sympathize with the cultural account of gentrification as an expression of an esthetic preference for historic architecture, diversity, and density (Caulfield 1994; Zukin 2011). Yet, many gentrifiers are also themselves critics of gentrification. They complain when a Starbucks or a condo complex moves into their neighborhood and some worry that the process of neighborhood transformation will ultimately displace low-income residents (Ley 2003). Is it a performative contradiction for a gentrifier to criticize gentrification? This paper seeks to answer this question by examining the cogency of arguments about the harms of gentrification.

What Is Gentrification? In his path-breaking book New Urban Frontier, Neil Smith (1996) described gentrification as ‘the process by which poor and working-class neighborhoods in the inner city are refurbished by an influx of private capital and middleclass home buyers and renters’ (30). Smith emphasized the importance of structural economic factors in understanding gentrification. For Smith, the key factor is the ‘rent-gap’, a cycle of disinvestment that ultimately renders poor neighborhoods potentially profitable sites of reinvestment. This is an important force driving gentrification, but other commentators have emphasized the cultural dimension of the phenomenon (Caulfield 1994; Butler 1997; Ley 2003, 1996). The term gentrification also points toward a link between demographic, economic, cultural, and spatial change and depicts this process in a negative light. City officials may promote mixed-income neighborhoods, livable cities, urban renaissance, revitalization, and renewal, but almost no one defends gentrification. The multifaceted character of gentrification was apparent even in the earliest use of the term (Glass 1964). Ruth Glass coined the term gentrification to link together a demographic process (the replacement of working-class

336  PART II   The Challenges of Governing the Divided Metropolis residents by middle and upper-class residents) and a spatial transformation (conversion of rental units and rooming houses into larger single-family homes) and to make empirical claims about the trajectory of this process. Crucially, she argued that once this process has started, it continues until almost all of the original residents have been replaced. The result is the radical cultural transformation of a neighborhood. While the built environment may be modified only slightly, the character of the neighborhood is destroyed and replaced by something different. Some scholars describe gentrification as a three-step process that begins with an influx of new residents with low financial capital but high cultural capital (artists, bohemians); they are followed by middle-class people who are drawn to the funky atmosphere and low prices; finally, the neighborhood is transformed to the point where it becomes attractive to developers and upper middle-class professionals. Jason Hackworth (2002) captured the core meaning succinctly when he defined gentrification as ‘the production of space for progressively more affluent users’ (p. 815). Critics have identified five primary harms of gentrification: residential displacement; exclusion; transformation of public, social and commercial space; polarization; and homogenization (Slater 2006; Lees 2000, 2008). Residential displacement and exclusion are terms that explain the decline in the number of poor and working-class residents. Displacement happens when landlords increase rents in order to profit from demand for units in the area. If there are no laws stabilizing rent and regulating tenancy, then high-income earners simply outbid the original residents. Scholars have also pointed out that even in places like Ontario, where rent increases are capped for the duration of the tenancy, market pressures can drive out the poor. In a gentrifying neighborhood, landlords have no incentive to negotiate with tenants who fall behind on their rent payments. It is in the landlords’ economic interest to pursue eviction rather than negotiation since they can lease empty units at a higher rent (Slater 2004). Another mechanism for displacing longtime residents is the conversion of rental units into condos or single-family dwellings. In a hot property market, landlords have an incentive to cash out and low-income tenants, who cannot afford to purchase a home, must move out of the neighborhood. Gentrification also entails the transformation of social space. This occurs through commercial displacement as well as political activity that changes the physical environment and the rules governing public space. Commercial displacement can happen in two different ways. Either businesses close because they cannot afford the increasing cost of rent in a gentrified neighborhood, or they lose their traditional customer base and are no longer profitable. The term exclusion reminds us that gentrification not only affects the current residents of a neighborhood, but also harms potential residents who are prevented from moving into a neighborhood because of rising

Chapter 6   Governance, Gentrification, and Neighborhoods   337

costs. For example, in Little Portugal, a gentrifying neighborhood in West Toronto, 66.4% of the long-standing Portuguese residents are homeowners and therefore less vulnerable to displacement (Murdie and Teixeira 2011, p. 10), but rising home prices in the area make it difficult for the children of residents to establish their own households and prevent new immigrants from moving into the neighborhood. Conversion to single-family homes can also decrease the total stock of rental units, thereby excluding renters from an area. Many people assume that gentrification must involve residential displacement given that gentrification is sometimes defined as the replacement of low-income residents by high-income residents. But replacement and displacement are conceptually distinct and there has been a great deal of debate about whether displacement does indeed take place and if so, whether the phenomenon is widespread (Vigdor 2002). The empirical record seems to be mixed. In one recent study of two neighborhoods in New York City, Lance Freeman (2005) found that displacement is not a significant force driving change in gentrifying neighborhoods. By comparing the mobility of poor people who live in gentrifying neighborhoods with those who do not, he found a difference of just 1%. On the other hand, Rowland Atkinson’s longitudinal study of residential patterns in London concluded that there is reason to believe that some displacement is driven by gentrification. It is beyond the scope of this article to provide new data to strengthen one side of the debate. Instead, I will examine the normative arguments about displacement and exclusion separately. There are different types of gentrification and some are more harmful than others. Even if gentrification is driven by replacement rather than displacement, the outcome may still be construed as harmful to the polity. The terms ‘homogenization’ and ‘polarization’ highlight negative aspects of gentrified neighborhoods (Lees 2008). The term homogenization criticizes gentrified neighborhoods for turning into elite enclaves or coming to resemble upscale malls. Polarization describes the opposite phenomenon. In neighborhoods where rent-controlled housing and expensive residences are in close proximity, the result may be what Robson and Butler (2001, p. 78) describe as ‘tectonic’: social groups are like tectonic plates which come into contact with one another, but this contact takes the form of disruptive collisions.

The Libertarian Approach to Gentrification Are these five processes occurring and if so, are they good reasons to oppose gentrification? Do current residents and/or nonresident poor people have a legitimate claim to housing in high-cost downtown neighborhoods and does this claim imply an obligation on the part of the government to provide it?

338  PART II   The Challenges of Governing the Divided Metropolis In ‘Housing and Town Planning’, Friedrich Hayek answers with an emphatic ‘no.’ Writing in the 1950s, gentrification was not his focus. Instead, he was concerned about the ways that public housing would distort urban property markets and exacerbate housing shortages. According to Hayek, urban land is desirable because of its commercial and industrial uses; it can therefore command a higher purchase price and rent. In a free market, each individual decides whether the benefits of urban living outweigh other preferences such as working fewer hours, having more space, transportation time, etc. If the government tries to lower the cost of housing, either directly through subsidy or indirectly through regulation, it makes the true cost less transparent, rendering it impossible for individuals to calculate their preferred tradeoffs. It also does nothing to alleviate the problem of excess demand and provides no fair alternative way of allocating housing. According to Hayek (1960), (Public housing) amounts to a stimulation of the growth of cities beyond the point where it is economically justifiable and to a deliberate creation of a class dependent on the community for the provision of what they are presumed to need…. Providing them with much better quarters at an equally low cost will attract a great many more. The solution of the problem would be either to let the economic deterrents act or to control directly that influx of population; those who believe in liberty will regard the former as the lesser evil. Versions of this argument are still popular and not only on the right. The core intuition is that middle-class people often move to the suburbs and endure long commutes because it is the only way to afford enough space for a family. Why then should public housing residents have access to the most expensive real estate downtown when they could be rehoused at lower cost in cheaper areas such as the inner suburbs? Hayek’s analysis in ‘Housing and Town Planning’ is relevant to the issue of gentrification for at least two reasons. First, following Hayek’s logic, gentrification is not a problem but rather a morally neutral and perhaps even desirable consequence of market principles. Paying higher rents in the city is a rational investment for those workers who will benefit from access to highly paid jobs; for workers who are unable to command a higher salary, it makes more sense to live in lower-cost areas. People sort themselves into neighborhoods based on their ability to pay, which reflects the productivity of their labor (see also Tiebout 1956). For Hayek, this is no injustice because city living is a luxury rather than a basic need. He assumes that poor people could remain in rural areas where the lower cost of living makes it easier to be self-supporting. If companies want to attract workers to the central city, they will be forced to pay correspondingly higher wages. In ‘Housing and Town Planning’, Hayek also provides reasons for his opposition to public housing and the logic of this argument is relevant to debates about gentrification. He points out that the free market mode of

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allocation may have disadvantages, but it is hard to come up with a fair alternative. Subsidizing housing in the city increases demand. […] It might be tempting to dismiss Hayek as a libertarian with no interest in social justice, but there is also a similar concern that emerges from leftwing egalitarian theory where it is called the problem of expensive tastes. The theoretical debate about expensive tastes is useful in unpacking opposing views about the harms of gentrification. The core question is whether people should receive extra resources in order to enable them to live in neighborhoods that became expensive due to gentrification. Drawing on the work of Gerry Cohen, I will argue that long-time residents of gentrifying neighborhoods did not choose to develop their ‘expensive taste’ for downtown living and, therefore, they deserve the extra resources that would enable them to satisfy this preference. In order to make this argument, the next section will introduce three key concepts from normative theory: sufficientarianism, luck egalitarianism, and expensive tastes.

Gentrification and Egalitarianism Equality can be interpreted in many different ways (Anderson 1999; Sen 1980). Some political philosophers argue that justice requires that society redistribute income to the point where inequalities do not exclude people from full membership in society (Walzer 1983; Anderson 1999). Rather than trying to achieve complete economic equality, this ‘sufficientarian’ approach emphasizes the need to ensure a decent standard of living for all by decommodifying necessities or guaranteeing a minimum income (Benbaji 2005; Huseby 2010; Frankfurt 1987, 1997). In this section, I draw on the sufficientarian approach not because I endorse it as the best standard of justice, but rather because it is an intuitively plausible guide for thinking about policy issues under current conditions (Arneson 2002). The second important theoretical concept is ‘luck egalitarianism’, which holds that inequalities caused by bad luck are morally problematic in a way that inequalities produced by choice are not. It is a widely shared moral intuition that we are responsible only for those actions that we caused (our choices) and not for outcomes that are beyond our control (luck). The third concept, ‘the problem of expensive tastes’, is a way of describing the fact that an equal distribution of resources does not necessarily secure equal well-being. This is because a person with expensive tastes ‘needs more income than others simply to achieve the same level of welfare as those with less expensive tastes’ (Cohen 1989; Dowrkin 2000). These three concepts help unpack the normative questions raised by gentrification, especially when gentrification takes the form of displacement. The following hypothetical example illustrates the policy implications of the normative question. Imagine a city called Sufficientlandia in which

340  PART II   The Challenges of Governing the Divided Metropolis all low-income households are provided with a sliding scale subsidy that makes it possible to pay the average cost of rent for an appropriately sized apartment in the city. Should people who currently live in gentrifying neighborhoods (places where market rents were below average but are now above average) receive a supplement that enables them to pay the new higher-than-average rent? A real-world illustration of this dilemma arose recently in Toronto. The Toronto Community Housing Corporation (TCHC) proposed to sell dozens of single-family homes across the city. The properties identified for sale were located in gentrified neighborhoods. In other words, they had been acquired at a low price decades earlier, but now were worth a great deal of money. TCHC claimed that the money realized from the sale would help repair other public housing units and benefit more people. Should the TCHC allow tenants to remain in their homes, even though the market value of these properties effectively rendered them an expensive taste? In ‘On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice’, Gerry Cohen (1989, p. 923) argues that an egalitarian distribution should accommodate expensive tastes as long as these tastes were not acquired intentionally. At first, this sounds absurd and his critics have highlighted the counterintuitive character of this proposal by mocking the idea that some people might need ‘Plovers eggs’ and ‘ancient claret’. For Cohen, it is a matter of ‘bad luck’ to have expensive tastes and therefore a consistent application of luck egalitarianism requires that people be compensated for them. I take this to be a reworking of the socialist principle ‘to each according to his needs’ transposed into the language of Anglo-American normative philosophy. In order to make this more plausible, Cohen notes that it can sometimes be difficult to distinguish between a disability and an expensive taste. Take the example of Percy who finds the taste of tap water unbearably sour and therefore chooses to drink bottled water (Dworkin 2000, p. 288). Given the cost of bottled water, Percy would need extra resources in order to have the same well-being as people with normal taste buds. In a certain sense, the purchase of bottled water is not only a choice, but it also has much in common with other disabilities that justify special compensation to overcome disadvantages. Dworkin responds to Cohen by distinguishing between two types of tastes: tastes that the individual affirms and tastes that the individual would disavow. Percy would prefer that water were not so distasteful, but most people’s attitudes to their expensive tastes do not fall into this category. The wine enthusiast, the exotic traveler, and the skier would not voluntarily swallow a magic pill which would make them indifferent to their preferred activities. According to Dworkin, people who subjectively identify with their expensive tastes are exercising a choice and are therefore responsible for the costs that this choice entails.

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In an essay entitled ‘Expensive Taste Rides Again’, Cohen (2004) addresses this objection. He insists that Dworkin overlooks the way that both choice and chance play a role in determining expensive tastes. People may affirm their tastes (choice) but they are still victims of bad luck, in so far as they would obviously prefer that these tastes were not expensive. In other words, they are victims of ‘bad price luck’ not ‘bad preference luck’. For example, I enjoy serial dramas with high production values and complex plotting but would prefer not to have to pay the extra cost of a subscription to HBO. If given the opportunity to take a pill that would transform me into a fan of reality TV, I would not take it but I would certainly use my magical wand to make other people into HBO fans, if this would drive down the cost. The point is that the market determines whether a taste is expensive or inexpensive and the individual is not able to control the market. Dworkin disagrees and maintains that without a market, there is no fair way to set prices. The market expresses the opportunity cost of satisfying one preference over another and, assuming that the initial distribution of resources is fair, it is the best way to give equal weight to everyone’s preferences. Cohen’s defense of expensive tastes is a provocative way of approaching the very real dilemmas that governments face when they have to decide whether to intervene in the market. Cohen helps explain why it is legitimate to distort market prices in order to achieve a different distribution of goods. Dworkin (2004) insists that the normative theory behind this position is flawed and the practical implications are absurd, but gentrification is a realworld issue that demonstrates the plausibility of Cohen’s position. Poor people who wish to remain in their gentrifying neighborhoods are classic victims of ‘bad price luck’. These residents could not reasonably be held responsible for the expensiveness of their taste. After all, they are the ones that moved into a low-cost neighborhood. These original residents acquired an attachment to a working-class neighborhood, which, due to the structural incentives for investors and the locational preferences of the creative class (Florida 2002), subsequently became expensive. Recall that an expensive taste is not merely a luxury that everyone desires but rather something that certain people need more than others in order to have the same level of well-being. This describes the preferences of current residents of transitional neighborhoods. Many people may desire to live in a certain neighborhood, but long-term residents often develop a particularly intense emotional attachment or sense of place that would be painful to disrupt (King 2004). […] Drawing on debates from egalitarian theory, this section has shown that there are good reasons to worry about the displacement of current residents, but less cause to be concerned about the exclusion of nonresidents. This is because the two groups are affected by gentrification in different ways. Nonresidents do not rely on existing place-specific networks of mutual

342  PART II   The Challenges of Governing the Divided Metropolis aid. Moreover, they do not have the same attachments and loyalties that are produced through histories, routines, and experiences connected with a particular place. They did not participate in the creation of the oeuvre of the neighborhood. […]

Democracy, Territoriality, and Place So far, this essay has treated the harm resulting from gentrification in individualistic terms. Even values like community and ‘loyalty to place’ have been described as the preferences or needs of particular individuals. Yet studies of gentrification remind us that this does not exactly capture the complexity of the phenomenon. Often what is lost through gentrification is not the individual’s home or apartment, but rather the neighborhood itself. Some longterm residents may stay, but they increasingly feel like aliens or outsiders in ‘their’ neighborhoods. One aspect of this process is commercial displacement. In Ontario, commercial tenants are not protected by the same law that limits rent increases for residential tenants. This means that commercial areas can change much more quickly than the surrounding residential neighborhoods do. Unable to compete with new commercial tenants, nonprofit cultural centers, mutual aid societies, or other community institutions may lose their space. Gentrifiers also use political as well as economic power to transform the character of public spaces. Gentrifiers redesign parks to make families feel welcome and homeless people unwelcome (Gold 2010); they mobilize to ensure that certain bars do not get their liquor licenses renewed (Goldberg 2008). They try to prevent social service providers from expanding their activities. Gentrifiers remake the public realm in order to fulfill their needs and desires. Through this process, a neighborhood’s history is effaced. In this section, I consider the issue of gentrification from a collective rather than an individual perspective. Do groups have a collective right to a certain kind of shared public or communal space? From the perspective of liberal theory, it is very hard to even conceptualize group rights. Liberal theory treats individuals as the bearers of rights and foremost among these are the right to private property. Even cultural rights are usually structured as group-differentiated individual rights. By this, I mean that individuals may have a right to certain accommodations by virtue of their membership in a group, but the individual exercises the right. For example, a Jewish individual might have a right to wear a kippa, but this does not give the Jewish community any rights. In a liberal framework, a group right takes the form of a right to selfgovernment of jurisdiction. For example, certain religious groups could have the right to decide on marriage and divorce laws and members of these groups are obliged to obey these rules. Should neighborhoods have group rights

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that they can use to project their collective interests? In other words, should neighborhoods have jurisdiction over local land use or other instruments that they could use to slow or stop the pace of neighborhood change? In order to answer this question, I draw on theories of territorial rights. According to David Miller (2011), territorial rights are exercised by peoples who gain these rights by adding material and symbolic value to land that they legitimately occupy. For the purposes of this discussion, they key issue is whether the residents of an urban neighborhood are ‘a people’. A people is a transhistorical group that transmits an identity over time, binding members to each other and distinguishing them from outsiders. Most urban neighborhoods do not meet these criteria. They are diverse communities that usually include many people with strong ties outside the neighborhood and limited ties within it. Given the porosity of borders within cities, change is rapid and transhistorical identities are uncommon. This suggests that neighborhoods are not the types of groups that have rights to territorial jurisdiction (Kolers 2009). Long-time residents may be harmed when their neighborhood changes in a way that makes it feel alien and unwelcoming, but this does not mean that any individual’s right has been violated. By a right, I mean a legitimate claim that entails an obligation on the part of someone else. Injustice describes those harms that imply an obligation on the part of someone else to remedy the harm, but not all harms fall into that category. For example, if a retailer or service provider decides to relocate because the customer or client base is located in another part of the city, he does not act unjustly by relocating, even though his departure is experienced as a harm by the remaining residents. The loss of a shared public world is a real harm, but it is also one that is particularly difficult to remedy without causing other problems. This is because the tools that could slow the pace of neighborhood change could also be used to undermine equality by excluding poor residents for other neighborhoods. For example, a theory of group rights could be used to justify neighborhood councils with powers to veto new developments, modify existing by-laws, or direct public monies to local projects. But ultimately, I think that this type of decentralization would do more harm than good. These neighborhood councils would easily be captured by gentrifiers and used to accelerate rather than slow the pace of change. These powers would also be used by elite or homogeneous neighborhoods to keep poor people, immigrants, and public housing out.

Polarization and Homogeneity Critics of gentrification see the process as a colonization of working class and immigrant neighborhoods that creates a uniformly middle-class environment. Proponents of down-town revitalization, however, take a somewhat different

344  PART II   The Challenges of Governing the Divided Metropolis view. They think that far from displacing beloved neighborhood institutions, new retailers contribute to the vitality of declining neighborhoods by renting space in buildings that have been empty for months or years. The rise of shopping malls, automobiles, and supermarkets rendered mom-and-pop stores obsolete and entire commercial streets were abandoned and boarded up. These new upscale boutiques and galleries are a way of recycling the built environment and adapting it for new uses. Gentrification is also sometimes promoted as a way of creating mixed-income, diverse neighborhoods. When upper middle-class residents move into working-class neighborhoods, they increase rather than decrease the diversity. What does the empirical literature say about these conflicting claims? In a recent study of Vancouver, Toronto, and Montreal, Alan Walks and Richard Maaranen (2008) examined whether gentrification increased or decreased socioeconomic and ethnic diversity. While there were some differences among the cities, this study found that completely gentrified neighborhoods tended to have greater levels of income polarization and economic inequality than they did before the influx of high-income residents. The increase, however, was not as great as the increase in inequality in the city as a whole during the same period. Most gentrified neighborhoods became more ethnically diverse over the period studied (1971–2001), but this reflected the changing demographics of the metropolitan area and these neighborhoods became less diverse than the city as a whole. Walks and Maaranen (2008) conclude that gentrification results in greater levels of income polarization and declining levels of social mix, ethnic diversity, and immigrant concentration within affected neighborhoods. This rigorous research provides important insights into patterns of demographic change within neighborhoods, but we should be very careful before drawing normative conclusions about gentrification in general. It is important to note that this study identifies two different categories: ‘gentrification’ and ‘incomplete gentrification’. Both types of neighborhoods experienced an increase in the average personal income, but in the neighborhoods which experienced ‘incomplete gentrification’, income did not rise above the Census Metropolitan Area (CMA) average. In both Toronto and Montreal, more neighborhoods experienced incomplete than complete gentrification. This seems to contradict the conventional wisdom that once gentrification begins, it does not stop until all of the poorer residents have been displaced (Glass 1964). Walks and Maaranen show that many neighborhoods that gained high-income residents in the 1970s or 1980s were still socioeconomically diverse in 2001. Between 18% and 25% of the residents in ‘incompletely gentrified’ neighborhoods still had household incomes below $20,000. The authors still worry that these mixed neighborhoods will become more economically polarized and ethnically

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homogeneous, but their evidence shows that so far, many of the gentrifying neighborhoods in Toronto and Montreal have not become elite enclaves but instead have stabilized as mixed-income neighborhoods. This longitudinal study shows us two trajectories, one that results in neighborhoods that are more homogeneous than the city as a whole and one that creates neighborhoods that are more economically diverse (but also more polarized) than the rest of the city. Should social mix be construed as a harm or a benefit? The academics, policy-makers, and planners who celebrate the idea of social mix do so for a number of different reasons. Some see it as a way to promote democratic citizenship by fostering informal social relationships and mutual understanding between different types of people (Young 1986; Bickford 2000). Others promote it as a way to help the poor by deconcentrating poverty. According to the theory, when middle class and poor people live side-by-side, the poor benefit from the amenities and the public services that the rich are able to secure: good schools, responsive policing, competitively priced shopping, recreational facilities, and regular street maintenance. Some go even farther and suggest that the informal interaction between the poor and the middle class may help inculcate more appropriate norms of behavior and build social connections that will lead to better jobs or academic success. The empirical evidence in favor of these claims is fairly thin (Ellen and Turner 1997; Galster 2012). Qualitative work on gentrification has pointed out that gentrifiers tend to build social networks with other people from the same social class even though, in theory, they enthusiastically endorse the diversity of the neighborhood (Robson and Butler 2001). The term ‘diversity’ tends to have a positive connotation but a neighborhood with economic diversity could also be described as polarized. In their study, Walks and Maaranen showed that income polarization increased in both types of gentrifying neighborhoods. When higher earners move into fairly homogeneous working-class neighborhoods, economic diversity and polarization increase. The score for income polarization is particularly sensitive to the presence of extremely high and low incomes. In incompletely gentrified neighborhoods, poor people and rich people live in close proximity. High levels of owner-occupancy, rent control, tenant protection laws, and public housing, all tend to create neighborhoods that change very slowly but the new high-income residents increase the level of economic polarization. Polarization can occur in many different ways. Imagine a society that initially has an equal distribution of wealth and, over time, becomes polarized. Our normative judgment depends on both our theory of equality and the empirical account of how polarization emerged. Consider the following three scenarios.

346  PART II   The Challenges of Governing the Divided Metropolis A Due to greater skill and hard work, half of the citizens become more prosperous while the others maintain the same income. This would not only increase polarization but would also be Pareto optimal, because some are better off and no one is worse off. B A group of the original residents band together and use their economic and political power to redistribute resources, rendering some poor and others rich. In this scenario there is a zero sum game, where the enrichment of some people comes directly at the expense of others. C A group of citizens introduce a division of labor and a set of material incentives which make some people more prosperous than others, but everyone is better off than they were under a system of equality. This is just according to Rawls’s difference principle (inequalities are justified if they benefit those who are the worst off) but not Cohen’s more demanding form of luck egalitarianism. Egalitarians condemn B but they are split about scenarios A and C. The empirical question is also subject to intense dispute and a great deal depends on whether the growing income polarization in Canada and the United States follows pattern A, B, or C. For the purposes of this paper, however, it is not necessary to resolve either the normative or empirical debate. Instead, I want to highlight the relationship between polarized neighborhoods and polarized polities. […] I do not think that the normative ideal of ‘together in difference’ provides strong theoretical reasons for either defending or criticizing gentrification. Gentrification increases social mix in some cases and decreases it in others. Furthermore, it is unclear whether social mix is always beneficial to subaltern groups and whether the benefits outweigh possible harms. I suspect that critics of neoliberalism are correct in arguing that the ideal of social mix sometimes functions ideologically to legitimize projects that take land currently used for public housing and make it available for private development (Hackworth 2006). But the ideal of social mix can also serve as a powerful argument against removing poor people from downtown and housing them in less expensive areas on the urban periphery. I think that the key concern of Young’s writing on ‘together in difference’ is a desire to understand the spatial dimension of the ideal of equality. In order to achieve equality, subaltern groups need more power. Sometimes living together in enclaves can be a source of power, either by facilitating political mobilization or by exercising informal control over a small area. At the same time, increased social mix can ensure access to desired public goods. Instead of focusing on social mix per se, we should think about how particular urban policies strengthen or weaken the position of the most vulnerable residents.

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Conclusion In this essay, I have considered five primary harms of gentrification: residential displacement; exclusion; transformation of public, social and commercial space; polarization; and homogenization. I examined whether these outcomes are associated gentrification and if so, whether they are harmful. Residential displacement is the most serious harm since it distributes the costs of neighborhood transition to people who are not responsible for the change. For these residents, gentrification is a form of bad luck and an egalitarian society should try to socialize the costs of experiencing this bad luck. This could take the form of public housing, rent control, or subsidies. The exclusion of nonresidents is a lesser harm, because nonresidents are usually not attached to the neighborhood in the same way. The harm of exclusion could be addressed by ensuring that all neighborhoods have access to comparable public amenities, including good schools, public transportation, and recreational facilities. A more radical solution would be to distribute housing using nonmarket mechanisms. Given the predominance of free market ideology and practices in North America, this solution probably sounds undesirable or impractical to most people, but it is worth noting that cities in Europe, such as Vienna and Amsterdam, have been successful at decommodifying housing (Fainstein 2010). The transformation of public/social space, polarization, and homogenization, all describe harms to communities and to the city itself rather than just the individual. As I suggested above, these changes may be harmful or beneficial, depending on the composition of the city as a whole and the power dynamics involved in the transformations. It is easy to overlook the way that the loss of certain distinctive neighborhoods and spaces may be accompanied by the creation of new ones located in parts of the city that are unfamiliar to the gentrifying class. Scarborough, an inner suburb of Toronto, provides many examples. There are few stately historic brick homes or quaint narrow commercial streets but there are lots of dynamic strip malls filled with ethnic entrepreneurs and ‘third spaces’ that meet the needs of immigrants living in the nearby high-rises. If the gentrification of downtown is harmful, should we view the establishment of dynamic new low-income, immigrant neighborhoods in the inner suburbs as a benefit? Not exactly. This question, however, helps us focus on the core harm of gentrification, which is not gentrification itself but rather inequality. Gentrification makes the increase in inequality and income polarization into something visible, vivid, and concrete. Moreover, it reminds us that the wealthy get to take what they want and leave everyone else with what they discard. Urban policy by itself cannot solve this problem.

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References Allen, C., 2008. “Gentrification ‘Research’ and the Academic Nobility: A Different Class?” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research Volume 32.1: 180–5 Anderson, E. 1999. “What is the Point of Equality?” Ethics 109 (2): 287-337. Arneson, R. J. 2002. “Why Justice Requires Transfers to Offset Income and Wealth Inequalities.” Social Philosophy and Policy 19(1): 172–200. Benbaji, Y. 2005. “The Doctrine of Sufficiency: a Defence.” Utilitas 17(3): 310–332. Berman, Marshall. 2009. On the Town: One Hundred Years of Spectacle in Times Square. Verso. Bickford, S. 2000. “Constructing Inequality: City Spaces and the Architecture of Citizenship. Political Theory 28 (3): 355-376. Butler, T. 1997. Gentrification and the Middle Classes. Brookfield, VT: Ashgate. Caulfield, J. 1994. City Form and Everyday Life: Toronto’s Gentrification and Critical Social Practice. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Cohen, G. A. 1989. “On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice.” Ethics 99: 906-44. Cohen, G. A. 2004. “Expensive Tastes Rides Again.” Dworkin and his Critics. Ed. Justine Burley. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. Dworkin, Ronald. 2000. Sovereign Virtue. The Theory and Practice of Equality, Cambridge Harvard University Press 2000. Dworkin, Ronald. 2004. “Ronald Dworkin Replies.” Dworkin and his Critics. Ed. Justine Burley. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. Ellen, I. & Turner, M. 1997. “Does Neighborhood Matter? Assessing Recent Evidence.” Housing Policy Debate, 8 (4): 833-866. Fainstein, Susan S. 2010. The Just City. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Florida, Richard. 2002. The Rise of the Creative Class. New York: Basic Books. Foucault, Michel. 1986. “Of Other Spaces.” Diacritics 16 (1): 22-27. Freeman, Lance. 2005. “Displacement or succession? Residential mobility in gentrifying neighborhoods.” Urban Affairs Review 40(4): 463–491. Frankfurt, Harry. 1987, “Equality as a Moral Ideal,” Ethics, 98: 21-42 Frankfurt, Harry. 1997, “Equality and Respect,” Social Research 64: 3-15. Galster, G. 2011. “The Mechanism(s) of Neighborhood Effects: Theory, Evidence, and Policy Implications.” In Bailey, N. et. al. (Eds.), Neighborhood Effects Research: New Perspectives New York: Springer. Glass, Ruth. 1964. London: aspects of change. London: MacGibbon & Kee. Gold, Kerry. 2010. “Class Warfare Erupts at Grandview Park.” The Globe and Mail. S.3. Goldberg, Brianna. 2008. “All we need is a Starbucks; Residents of Oakwood and Vaughan desperately seek gentrification.” National Post. Hackworth, Jason. 2002. “Postrecession Gentrification in New York.” Urban Affairs Review 37 (6): 815-843. Hackworth, Jason. 2006. The Neoliberal City: Governance, Ideology, and Development in American Urbanism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Hayek. F. A. 1960. The Constitution of Liberty. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 340-357. Huseby, Robert, 2010. “Sufficiency: Restated and Defended.” The Journal of Political Philosophy 18 (2): 178–197.

Chapter 6   Governance, Gentrification, and Neighborhoods   349 Kolers, Avery. 2009. Land, Conflict, and Justice: A Political Theory of Territory. Cambridge Cambridge University Press. Lees, Loretta. 2000. “A reappraisal of gentrification: towards a ‘geography of gentrification’, Progress in Human Geography 24: 389–408. Lees, Loretta. 2008. “Gentrification and Social Mixing: Towards an Inclusive Urban Renaissance?” Urban Studies 45: 2449-2470. Ley, David. 2003. “Artists, Aestheticisation and the Field of Gentrification.” Urban Studies, 40 (12): 2527–2544. Ley, David. 1996. The New Middle Class and the Remaking of the Central City. Oxford: Oxford University Press. King, Loren. 2004. “Democratic hopes in the polycentric city.” Journal of Politics 66: 203-223. Miller, David. 2012. “Territorial Rights: Concept and Justification.” Political Studies 60: 252-268. Murdie, Robert and Teixeira, Carlos. 2011. “The Impact of Gentrification on Ethnic Neighbourhoods in Toronto: A Case Study of Little Portugal.” Urban Studies 48(1): 61-83. Putnam, Robert. 2007. “E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty-First Century.” Scandinavian Political Studies 30 (2): 137-174. Robson, Garry and Butler, Tim. 2001. Coming to Terms with London: Middle-Class Communities in a Global City.” Journal of Urban and Regional Research 25 (1): 70-86. Sen, A. 1980. Equality of What? Tanner Lectures on Human Values. Sennett, R. 2008. The Uses of Disorder: Personal Identity and City Life. New Haven: Yale University Press. Slater, T. 2006. “The Eviction of Critical Perspectives from Gentrification Research.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 30 (4): 737-57. Slater, T. 2004. “Municipally managed gentrification in South Parkdale, Toronto.” Canadian Geographer 48 (3): 303-325. Smith, N. 1996. The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City. New York: Routledge. Tiebout, C. 1956. “A Pure Theory of Local Expenditures.” The Journal of Political Economy 64 (5): 416-424. Tuan, Y.F. 1974. Topophilia. New York: Columbia University Press. Vigdor, J. 2002 “Does gentrification harm the poor?” Brookings-Wharton Papers on Urban Affairs: 133–73. Walks, A. and R. Maaranen. 2008. “Gentrification, Social Mix, and Social Polarization Testing the Linkages in Large Canadian Cities.” Urban Geography 29 (4): 293-326 Walzer, M. 1983. Spheres of Justice: a defense of pluralism and equality. New York: Basic Books. Young, I.M. 1986. “City Life and the Politics of Difference.” Social Theory and Practice 12: 1-26 Zukin, S. 2011. Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places. Reprint. Oxford University Press, USA.

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20 Gentrifier? Who, Me? Interrogating the Gentrifier in the Mirror John Joe Schlichtman and Jason Patch†

The Mirror At the 2009 RC-21 conference in São Paulo, a young scholar began her presentation with the premise ‘we all know that gentrification is bad’. Urban scholars rail against the process of gentrification and its destruction of workingclass communities. We read about the waves of gentrifiers and the kinds of cafes, boutiques and new amenities that they bring. We express worry to our peers that the city is going to become a bastion of elitism or a generic suburb stripped of diversity. Often, we treat gentrification as a contemporary form of urban class and racial warfare (Smith, 1996). As urbanists, however, we increasingly notice an elephant sitting in the academic corner: many (dare we say most—‘mainstream’ and critical) urbanists are gentrifiers themselves. As Brown-Saracino (2010: 356) suggests, ‘many of us have firsthand experience with gentrification’. But what difference has this made on our research? Very little. We have created an artificial distance in our analysis because we do not examine our own relationship to the data. The last few years have witnessed lively debates among urbanists on the topic of gentrification. Some of these debates have seemed quite personal. The truth is that those of us situated in the phenomenon of gentrification carry suppositions on the issue that are deeply rooted in our personal biographies. We agree with Maso (2001: 137) that the phenomena must be considered a myth’. We must not attempt to artificially ‘bracket’ our own biographies from our scholarly debate. Because ‘perception and interpretation are inseparable’, our interpretation of others’ gentrification (be they ethnographic field members or colleagues) is inevitably inextricably tied to our own housing choices (ibid.). Assuming that we are free to go on our way after we have socially located ourselves in relation to our research

† Schlichtman, J.J. and Patch, J. (2014), ‘Gentrifier? Who, Me? Interrogating the Gentrifier in the Mirror’, Debates and developments. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 38(4) pp. 1491-1508. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.12067 (John Wiley and Sons)

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(in terms of class, race/ethnicity, etc.) can be ‘benignly patronizing at best, and oppressive at worst’ (Nygreen, 2009: 19). With this in mind, we provide a comparative pair of ethnographic memoirs, or autoethnographies, that emplace ourselves in the phenomenon of gentrification. We each seek to combine our ‘personal story’ with our ‘scholarly story’ to create an account that ‘is not strictly scholarly because it contains the personal, and . . . not strictly personal because it contains the scholarly’ (Burnier, 2006: 412). […] Second, we understand that structural pressures enable gentrification and that these pressures are part and parcel of a capitalist economy. A structural approach provides us a very sharp understanding of the macro-level but gets a bit more fuzzy as one ‘zooms in’. Consumption patterns, on the other hand, are very sharp on the street level and get a bit more fuzzy as one ‘zooms out’. […] Third, as people share housing biographies in light of the literature, there is a tendency to make appraisals of their ethics. It is for this reason that Slater (2006: 752) felt the need to reiterate that his goal is not to ‘demonize gentrifiers’, because this is what we so often do. For instance, the smug appraisal that the authors receive in discussing this topic is that this whole thing is really very simple: the authors’ class positionality (singular) has determined who we (plural) are: we are rather homogeneous Americans with unyielding middle-class tastes who are less than concerned about larger issues of injustice and more concerned with where the middle class is to live (see Slater, 2006: 296). Elegantly stated; but if this is who we are in your broad-brush stokes, then who are you in your broad-brush strokes? In this essay, we resist addressing such sweeping speculations. We will not interrogate the grounds on which they are made (e.g. that we have ‘middleclass’ backgrounds; that ‘middle-class tastes’, geographies, biographies, etc. are uniform; that ‘middle-class tastes’ drive gentrification), simply because they would require a different literature and another paper. Nor will we try to disprove them by justifying ourselves with progressive resumes. Instead, we will note that it is instructive when discussions of gentrification tend to take on this tone, a tone that leads many scholars to be ‘secret gentrifiers’ and that, in the words of one of our wonderfully-insightful referees, ‘sucks the air out of the room’. Related to the third potential critique is a fourth: that there are other pressing urban issues that we should be worrying about. In short: of course. While Slater (2010: 306), for this reason, suggests that scholars must cease in giving attention to ‘the consumer preferences of middle-class gentrifiers’ and focus on the displaced, we believe that understanding the motivations of gentrifiers (especially us) could be a way to affect displacement today outside of the revolutionary structural change that would bring ‘social ownership of

352  PART II   The Challenges of Governing the Divided Metropolis housing … the social control of land, the resident control of neighborhoods’ and other just allocations (Achtenberg and Marcuse, 1986: 476). By giving attention to our individual decisions in light of our awareness of structural processes, we are only seeking to be reflective and to encourage reflectivity and honesty. Let us be clear: we are in no way suggesting that our conundrums as housing consumers compare to the detriment of unregulated gentrification to those displaced by it. We are arguing merely that it is productive to pause and take stock of our own emplacement in gentrification (rather than ‘bracketing’ it) and, furthermore, to discuss that emplacement in light of the literature. On that note, Slater (2006: 294) suggests that ‘urban scholars’ are ‘in a far more comfortable position than those standing up to successive waves of gentrification’. Yes, but what is that position? Whether as a graduate student looking for affordable housing, a young urban scholar looking for a first apartment to match a first job, or a tenured faculty with family, an urbanist uses her knowledge of urban processes to choose a neighborhood. The social mixers at international conferences of urbanists suggest that these scholars are no stranger to the gentrifier’s taste for quality coffee, quality food, and an edgy style of clothes. We often find ourselves in the very economic and cultural class positions we analyse from a safe distance in our work. While Slater (2006: 752) echoes one smug Berlin researcher that ‘the only positive to gentrification is being able to find a good cup of coffee when conducting fieldwork’, we believe that many urbanists can get good coffee closer to home. And if they can’t, that probably means (by the critical formulation) that they themselves are ‘pioneers’ (Smith, 1996). (A-ha!) This essay reflects upon how our personal lives have engaged the gentrifier’s dilemma in New York, San Diego, Providence and Chicago. In the next section, we outline a simple method that structured this reflection. We do not know exactly where this exercise in reflectivity will lead, but we are committed to the notion that it must be done. We feel that any response that our memoirs and this essay incite (e.g. anger, empathy, etc.) will be valuable because a more reflective gentrification scholarship will have effects on the complexity of our work and on the integrity of the literature. We cannot create honest, street-level interventions if we divorce our scholarly formulations from our own lives.

The Gentrifier’s Diagnostic Tool Our goal in this section is not to provide another definition of gentrification (see Patch and Brenner, 2007), but to provide a tool to place oneself in context. Our tool includes six interrelated ‘pulls’—economic, practical, aesthetic, amenity, social and symbolic—that gentrifiers express feeling and one extraordinary ‘flexibility’—that for inconvenience—that they seem to possess. These seven indicators are accompanied by what are understood to

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be three interrelated effects on longer-term residents: displacement, signaling and cultural change. The reality, of course, is that all of these phenomena are concomitant (Giddens, 1984). We diagnose ourselves using this tool in our two memoirs. Here, we discuss them in a rather detached manner. The gentrifier’s locational decision is characterized by an economic pull. They are pulled, first, by the affordability of housing. ‘Much of what are alternatively referred to as “alternative lifestyles”, reduced to exogenous “fashions” by neoclassical theorists and viewed pejoratively by some Marxists’ states Rose (1984: 63), ‘in fact symptomize attempts by educated young people, who may be unemployed, underemployed, temporarily employed (or all three simultaneously), to find creative ways of responding to new conditions’. Second, if the gentrifier is a buyer, she may be pulled by the potential for stability or increases in housing values. Housing, historically, can be a key household investment, especially in the United States. The gentrifier’s decision is characterized by a practical pull. Gentrifiers enjoy neighborhood centrality. They are conscious of ‘the advantages of living close to the center of the city’ (Anderson, 1989: 29). As Butler’s (1997: 113) respondent noted, ‘our reason for coming here was very specific, we were living in south-east London and the year we married my mother died; my father was living in north-west London and we needed to be in-between the two’. Another stated how commuting time affected family life and decided ‘if we had to pay £1,000 on a mortgage that was better than paying £1,000 on travel expenses’ (ibid.). Moreover, gentrifiers appreciate the size of home they can afford in a gentrifying neighborhood. They may appreciate the extra square footage due to the ease with which they could entertain friends and family, as a function of a desire to have a live-work space, or due to anticipating a growing family. The gentrifier’s decision is characterized by an aesthetic pull. Some gentrifiers have a desire to live in a particular (e.g. historic) type of home. This appreciation is often associated with valuing particular architectural styles. Zukin (1982: 58) states, for instance, ‘that people began to find the notion of living in a loft attractive’. Anderson (1989: 50) discusses ‘the big old Victorian townhouses’ of Philadelphia as being a draw to early gentrifiers. Butler (1997: 108) notes the ‘architectural significance’ of the De Beauvoir neighborhood in London and particularly the ‘architectural integrity of the whole area’. The gentrifier’s locational decision is characterized by an amenity pull; the proximity to museums, parks, waterfronts, schools and other urban amenities. Scholars like Lloyd (2006: 102) believe that ‘bars, restaurants, and coffee shops’ can also be ‘crucial’. When we talk about an amenity pull, we mean the pull of amenities for their use value only: using the park, using the cafe, using the waterfront, etc. These amenities, besides having practical uses (e.g. the cafe is a useful, low-rent work space for workers in the service

354  PART II   The Challenges of Governing the Divided Metropolis economy and for students), also help ‘people to make new social contacts and thus extend the local community’ (ibid.). This is an important component of the next pull, the social. Some gentrifiers appreciate being immersed in a diverse neighborhood that includes immigrants, working-class residents, older people, etc. ‘The biggest reason that I like living in this area is the ethnic diversity and the range of incomes and social classes’ wrote one gentrifier (Brown-Saracino, 2004: 272). Some suggest that gentrifiers desire—in addition to the aforementioned desire or perhaps to the exclusion of it, depending on who you ask—to be part of a common bohemian community (Lloyd, 2006). The first type, we might say, are pulled to the longer-term residents, the second to other gentrifiers. Either way, in a Facebook world, gentrifiers seem to seek materially-derived social capital: relationships with their neighbors that come from being a ‘user’ of their neighborhood rather than commuting to other parts of the city for different needs or wants. Appropriating the words of Jacobs (1961: 152), gentrifiers want to be among a community of ‘people who go outdoors on different schedules and are all in the place for different purposes, but who are able to use many facilities in common’. They tend to believe that ‘if a city’s streets look interesting, the city looks interesting; if they look dull, the city looks dull’ (ibid.: 29). The gentrifier’s locational decision is characterized by a symbolic pull. Some suggest that certain gentrifiers feel an attachment to local history. They desire to ‘save’ a neighborhood and return it to its heyday. Others say that gentrifiers desire to live alongside longtime residents with whom they associate ‘authentic’ community (Brown-Saracino, 2004). This results in a concern for longtime residents that we separate from the ‘social pull’ above. While the ‘social pull’ involves wanting to be around and interact with different types of people, the ‘symbolic pull’ seeks to preserve a heritage of the place of which those people are a necessary part. Gentrifiers exhibit a flexibility and willingness to accept gentrification’s inconveniences. First, they are willing to—or perhaps desire to—live in a disinvested neighborhood with less infrastructure (Rose, 1984; Sassen, 1991). They are willing to accept the personal financial risk that comes with living in a less stable neighborhood. They are willing to invest time, labor and money in renovation. They are flexible enough to reside in places where local amenities and services are not the best available. Second, they may express a cultural flexibility. They may see themselves as ‘flexible’ enough to live among people with whom they are unfamiliar (at least for the moment) and from whom they are culturally and linguistically separate. Some may even appear to be ‘flexible’ to live among people whom they fear, such as young people they suspect to be gang members. Overall, this type of social flexibility may be expressed as a willingness to live amidst crime and ‘grit’—or as a more general ‘streetwise’ attitude (Anderson, 1989; Lloyd, 2006).

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Gentrifiers’ locational decisions influence economic displacement. Quite simply, it is widely argued that gentrifiers’ presence causes rises in rents, increases in property values, upward pressure on property taxes, and an increased cost of living, all resulting in the displacement of lower income residents. This is accomplished both by rental property being converted for sale and an increasing demand for limited housing stock. For every moreaffluent resident that moves in, acknowledges (even) Florida (2008: 247), ‘it is likely that a lower-income family, or part of that family, has been driven out’ and that ‘lower- and working-class households struggle to find affordable rental housing that will allow them to raise their families and make ends meet’. Moreover, this displacement is usually desired by real estate entrepreneurs and municipal leaders. Properties in a gentrified neighborhood, suggests Anderson (1989: 29), ‘have attained a value that depends not simply on the racial makeup of the present residents, but on the racial and class attributes of potential residents, and thus on the future of the area’. Gentrifiers signal neighborhood change to potential residents and investors. Via social networks and new uses of space, early gentrifiers serve as a signal to other groups that had not in recent times been interested in the neighborhood (Patch and Brenner, 2007). ‘Young white students’, states Anderson (1989: 36), ‘live in areas that yuppies would never consider’ and ‘their numbers help claim the streets for whites’. Less flexible potential residents, the story goes, see the new residents and assume that the neighborhood must be decreasing in ‘grit’ and may even empirically observe some new threshold of convenience in the neighborhood—‘less litter, more glitter’ as stated by one later gentrifier (Frech et al., 2004; see also Carpenter and Lees, 1995; Bondi, 1999). These potential new residents would compose, it has been said, the ‘second wave’ of gentrification. Eventually, all of this new activity also signals to real estate capitalists that this land may be generating enough interest to warrant investment and even large-scale development of condominiums, large chain businesses such as Starbucks or Trader Joe’s, office condominiums, or art supply stores. Often, in this ‘commercial’ stage, the ‘eccentric, believable, and vulnerable remains’ of the neighborhood are ‘distorted and vulgarized by marketing formulas’ (Huxtable, 1997: 97). Gentrifiers influence socio-cultural change in a neighborhood. For instance in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, Hasidic Jews, Dominicans and white hipsters compete over the cultural landscape. Nuevo Latino restaurants and diners serving fine wine neighbor bodegas and older Puerto Rican and Dominican men playing dominoes (Patch, 2004; 2008). Long-time homeowners who are reaping huge rises in property values or huge returns in rents (by converting portions of their homes to apartments) begin to cash in by selling their properties for 300, 400, or 500% returns—pulled out by the inviting windfall to be sure, but also pushed out by the new unfamiliarity of their neighborhood.

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Connecting the Meso and the Memoir: The Accounts of Schlichtman and Patch Schlichtman’s Account Over the last 15 years, I have lived in three clearly-gentrifying neighborhoods. In all three gentrifying neighborhoods, as with four other residences that I will not discuss, an economic pull has been a key impetus in my residential decision. In Fort Greene, Brooklyn, in 1998, I rented a $500/month room in a subdivided brownstone of single rooms with kitchenettes where residents on each floor shared a bathroom. In Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, from 2006 to 2007, my wife (who grew up in the neighborhood) and I rented an $800/ month apartment on the top floor of my in-laws’ brownstone. In 2009, my wife and I purchased a home in Golden Hill, San Diego. At this writing, we are in the process of a move to Chicago. In Fort Greene and Bedford-Stuyvesant, I feel that I was an unwitting gentrifier. I use the term ‘unwitting gentrifier’ to express the fact that I chose to live in these two neighborhoods for economic and practical reasons alone, two considerations that play into every voluntary relocation choice made by any consumer. I moved to New York for graduate school in the late 1990s and lived at Long Island University in downtown Brooklyn (although I attended NewYork University) because it was the most inexpensive housing arrangement available. After one year, my friend Kevin—a black Brooklyn native who sang in my predominantly black church choir—suggested that I should live in his ‘rooming house’, which was owned by a West Indian family that lived on the first floor. My landlord was a wonderful character named Clyde—the family patriarch—who owned buildings all over the neighborhood. For a year, Kevin (who was not West Indian) and I lived on this mostly West Indian block of Vanderbilt Avenue when we began to notice a change in the residents around us. A multi-racial group of three female students from London moved into the West-Indian-managed building next door to us. Although the building was structured similarly, this group was paying $850 for their renovated room—70% more than us. A gay white couple moved in on the other side of us. While Kevin and I were both experiencing the marked change in our neighborhood, the new residents assumed that I was one of ‘them’. Until this point, I had been rather ignorant of the ramifications of the gentrification in which I was emplaced, but yet I began to feel uncomfortable, liminal, betwixt and between (Turner 1967).1 (Was my feeling of liminality based on race, social class, or social network? Looking back, am I allowed in urbanist circles to call this ‘our’ neighborhood: was it in some way Kevin’s but not mine?) When my wife (who is a black Brooklyn native, of West Indian heritage) and I married in 2006, my in-laws invited us to rent on their block where four generations of her family have lived in three brownstones for decades.

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I spent time with my new ‘uncles-in-law’ as they washed their cars; I visited ‘Granny’ and attended backyard cookouts across the street; I sat on the steps and talked politics with my father-in-law as he smoked his cigar and long-time residents greeted us. But as white and Asian gentrifiers began to move into the neighborhood, I once again felt liminal, betwixt and between: I did not enter the neighborhood by any of the pulls of gentrification yet I was undoubtedly serving as a signal of neighborhood change to long-time residents and to current and potential gentrifiers. My ties and my identity were with the family with whom I shared the block, but my race suggested otherwise. My wife and her siblings joked that ‘my people’ were on their way. Again, as in Fort Greene, I felt the discomfort of being grouped with a new critical mass of the ‘threatening’ ‘white’ ‘influx’. I was joined on the subway station platform by other white people on a regular basis for the first time, white people bearing the marks of gentrifiers: Whole Foods grocery store bags, art supply bags, expensive mountain bikes, anti-capitalist tee shirts, small dogs in bags. The ways that long-term residents made sense of the neighborhood changed. At one time people saw a white man in isolation and assumed ‘he must have a reason for being here’. Now, I felt the stare of ‘it is only a matter of time before they change our neighborhood’. As my position changed in the eyes of other residents, I found myself peering into the looking glass of gentrification (Cooley, 1902). Who I was changed with the changes in the neighborhood. At times, a black resident would mutter at me under his breath (e.g. ‘cracker’) as I walked the eight blocks from the subway to my apartment. When this occurred, I would oftentimes go to shoot the breeze with the mutterer as if I had not heard: somehow my anger usually drew me towards people. I refused to consider myself separate from the community. If not here, where? I oftentimes thought about what the urban literature would say about me: that I did not belong, that my ‘privilege’ was overwhelming my neighbors and would soon displace them. Hogwash, I thought: this is my family and I have as much right to be in this majority-black neighborhood as my wife would have in being in the majority-white neighborhood of the suburb where I was raised. ‘Residents are residents’ is what I felt, seemingly casting all of my training aside. Of course, I completely understood the scale at which the critical urban literature examined the issue. And I agreed, more or less, with the assessment. I also understood the long-time residents’ perspective: as I descended the subway stairs, it was clear that I appeared to fit in more with the interchangeable black-adorned art student with a one-year lease, an uncommon hair style, and an instrument case than I did the middle-aged West Indian women in their long-sleeve blouses and long skirts. And I (to add to the complexity) was concerned about the cultural change signified by that music student too. Was I just a first-wave gentrifier concerned

358  PART II   The Challenges of Governing the Divided Metropolis by the presence of a second wave? Was I just a ‘social preservationist’ (BrownSaracino, 2009) hoping to preserve the unadulterated purity of my exotic black environment? Was I just slumming? All of these perspectives portrayed me as a self-interested voyeur. I did not really believe any of them. I wondered how other urbanists situated themselves in the literature. Are some accepting of the literature’s simplistic portrayal of the gentrifier because they assume themselves to be outside of the phenomena or to be an exception to the stereotype? It seemed to my wife, interestingly, that the meaning attached to her had changed as well. Before the influx, I imagined that it was clear that I was ‘with’ her and that she belonged. I was aware of many white spouses who lived with their mates in black communities in every region of the country; there was what seemed to be a value-neutral ‘conceptual category’ for this. Since the influx, however, we felt that my presence with my wife caused some people to view her as a gentrifier who was ‘with’ me. From 2007 to 2009, after a move to San Diego, my wife and I lived on my institution’s campus at no cost. When it came time to move, we had an extremely difficult time finding a neighborhood in San Diego where we felt comfortable (see Erie et al., 2011; Davis et al., 2003 for discussions of San Diego’s peculiarities). It was important to us to have a place that we could afford. However, that said, with two incomes and two years-worth of savings, we had more purchasing power than we had ever possessed. For me, for the first time, there was much more to a neighborhood than its economic pull and its practical pull. We had the financial flexibility and buying power to be conscious of other pulls. The look of the housing unit mattered more than in the past: this was a place that we, for the first time in our adult lives, would be calling home. It was where we hoped, in the near future, to raise children (and, thankfully, would.) Most important was the social pull of a neighborhood. We had long felt it would be most healthy for our children to understand their multiracial heritage in the context of either a black or a multiracial neighborhood. Besides, these were the contexts where we were most comfortable. It struck me that there have always been individuals who have had socially healthy reasons (i.e. not ‘slumming’ or ‘social preservation’) to live among people who are unlike themselves in some way (e.g. in race, ethnicity, class, religion, etc.), including before Glass (1964) coined her term. (In the United States, there have long been, of course, lone white folks in black neighborhoods, black churches and black political organizations.) It seems, today, that all of these pulls get subsumed into a gentrification framework, especially if the ‘pulled’ also enjoy coffee and walkability. The amenities did matter to us. We wanted to be able to take walks, perhaps in a park, on a trail, or near a waterfront. As a professor, I valued nearby places such as cafes where I would be able to put in an eight or ten

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hour day of writing or grading away from my students for $2 or $3 (as I am now.) And yes, the aesthetic of the unit and of the neighborhood mattered: we wanted our home to be an extension of us as a family. I also felt a new practical pull that I had not in the past: square footage. As San Diego was not feeling like home to us after 2 years, it sweetened the deal if we could have space to put up friends and family from back East. We were disoriented by the race and class dynamics in San Diego. Looking for what we knew as the complex ‘black neighborhood’ in other cities— which often evidence some class diversity on the ground (e.g. high-income blue-collar workers, retirees, young lower-income families, etc.) even when aggregate statistics suggest a dearth of such diversity—we were struck by the seeming lack of vibrancy within black neighborhoods in San Diego proper.2 We had a hunch that the white-dominant, ‘post racial’, and ‘colorblind’ San Diego culture was playing a role in this perceived dynamic. But whatever the root cause, despite looking for a home in these neighborhoods, we could not understand them well enough socially to live in them, or—in an economic sense—invest our income in them. When exploring the large-scale gentrified downtown we, in the words of Lynch’s (1960: 41) Los Angeles respondent, ‘discovered there was nothing there, after all’. It was a bright, shiny, free-market architectural hodge-podge that had no past and, to us, very little substance in the present. We also visited small apartments in San Diego’s higher-end neighborhoods. We looked at huge subdivided historic homes in poorer neighborhoods, stepping over the twin size beds of the six people we would be displacing as the real estate agent asked us to envision the shell of a home that existed beyond the fabricated walls of a rooming house. We considered subdivided homes in gentrifying neighborhoods adjacent to the city’s Little Italy that we would be able to keep subdivided and rent to Section 8 (federally funded housing subsidy programme) voucher holders. Then one day, we found Golden Hill, San Diego while looking at an overpriced home in a clearly gentrified part of the neighborhood adjacent to downtown (there was a women’s museum, a tattoo parlor, and a media arts non-profit within two blocks.) As we continued to walk the neighborhood, we found a clear race and class diversity that we had not seen in San Diego. We were energized. I learned that while the neighborhood had changed over the previous 20 years, it had proven to be rather resistant to some of the rapid displacement found elsewhere. Nevertheless, after we moved in, it became clear that any urbanist would label our neighborhood ‘gentrifying’. There is a rise in certain types of ‘middle-class’ cafes, restaurants and other businesses, such as a wine bar that some business owners seem to view as a flag marking this ‘frontier’ as gentrified territory. I have overheard residents discussing the wine bar, seeming to echo Butler’s (1997: 123) respondent (also discussing a wine bar) who breathed ‘a sigh of relief that “my god, you didn’t put all of your money

360  PART II   The Challenges of Governing the Divided Metropolis onto a dud and something is happening[,] is changing”’. ‘Good for property values’, a Golden Hill resident said to me of the wine bar one morning as I walked with my daughter. As I move to a new professorship in Chicago, my wife and I are once again looking for a home in the city. I have asked critical geographers at my next institution their opinion on what neighborhoods I might move to in Chicago that would be a ‘responsible’ choice (i.e. where a tsunami of displacement is not on the horizon), but this query is almost humorous, as their positions are, of course, also fraught with complexity. This time, my wife and I come with a 2-year-old, a 4-month-old, and a desire to adopt more children. Unfortunately for my wife, who ascended from lower-working-class neighborhoods to a stable middle-class position (none of our four parents went to university), she has not only her academic husband to deal with, but also the consciousness of urban processes that he carries. She wants her daughters to be safe from gun violence and educated in schools that are not failing. I want both of these things, of course—and in a way that I never imagined before being a parent. But I also do not want us to, residentially-speaking, turn our backs on Chicago’s greatest challenges, namely its deteriorating public schools and the escalating violence among the youth that has touched people in our circle of friends and family. Our criteria—notably, the practical pull of being on transportation lines, the social pull of being in either a black or mixed-race neighborhood, and the economic constraints of my professor salary—will once again likely lead us to a gentrifying, near gentrifying, or already gentrified neighborhood such as Bronzeville (Pattillo, 2007), an area that also has an aesthetic ‘architectural integrity’ that energizes us (Butler, 1997: 108). My wife, by chance or by effort, chose a real estate agent with whom I could openly discuss my perspective. He comes from a real estate perspective to be sure, but has also lived in Bronzeville all of his 50-plus years and clearly respects the social fabric. As it turns out, we have mutual acquaintances, which helped us to speak openly about my position. When I told him that I was not comfortable with the wave of speculation that appeared to be occurring in one particular area, he stated ‘Yes, in this neighborhood, you would be a pioneer’. My wife cringed, knowing that the conversations of the afternoon were going to shift after his use of the ‘P’ word. With our first home purchase has come, three years later, our first home sale. As a black and white couple who are often wearing semi-professional dress on San Diego’s major downtown thoroughfare with a toddler in tow, we have surely provided a signal for another type of consumer, one who wants to live in the neighborhood in some imagined, more class-homogeneous, bohemian future rather than in its complex present. In my urbanist mind, all potential buyers are guilty until proven innocent. My wife, of course, points

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out the hypocrisy in this being a ‘progressive’ perspective, a hypocrisy that I feel is reflected in our literature. My hunch is not completely unfounded: our realtor has mentioned consumers’ concerns about the neighborhood. And the two times we have run into people viewing our San Diego home, they asked us what we think of our neighbors, one using the term ‘riffraff’, another pointing at the restored 1980s Oldsmobiles in front of the cheaply-built but tidy apartments across the street. But exactly what am I to do in this situation? All of the possible anti-gentrification options (e.g. subdividing and renting it for cheap, selling it for 1/3 less than we paid) are not feasible: they involve selling the home at a loss, which our family cannot afford. At this moment, what options are available to me besides cursing the system? Or do I simply divorce my residential choices from my scholarly life, fighting structure while enjoying my agency?

Patch’s Account As with Schlichtman, I spent a series of years in NewYork City during my graduate work and for a visiting teaching position. In many ways my trajectory seemed to follow Gans’ (1962) typology of inner-city residents. I have seen myself as a ‘cosmopolite’ and ‘unmarried and childless’. I arrived in New York in the mid-1990s with a pre-existing social network of great-aunts and college friends. I remember drinking coffee with my aunts and explaining to them that I was going to live in either Park Slope or Williamsburg. Over the course of my first four years in New York I lived in a sublet within a partially converted Williamsburg factory, then a brownstone in Fort Greene, then over a store in Park Slope, then back to Williamsburg to live in an illegal basement apartment lacking windows, before moving to the Hamilton Heights section of Harlem. Each of these neighborhoods was going through a stage of gentrification. Fort Greene and Hamilton Heights were heavily black and Latino areas. The sections of Williamsburg and Park Slope I lived in consisted of Latino, Italian and Polish families; and (in Williamsburg) Hasidic Jews. Three of these moves entailed sharing an apartment or a building address with friends. Each place had a density of my friends already living there and recommending I move in. My goal was to ‘dwell among friends’ (Fischer, 1982). It seems a mistake to treat gentrification as strictly a set of class-determined consumption practices or as dictated by the labor needs of capital. In my life, as with others, neighborhood selection depends on social network effects. As with Schlichtman, getting married altered my connection to gentrification, by making gender more visible (Warde, 1991). My wife moved in with me in Harlem. The economic and practical needs of two were different from a single, twenty-something graduate student. Small quantitative and

362  PART II   The Challenges of Governing the Divided Metropolis life stage changes in relationships make for significant qualitative changes (Gans, 1962; Simmel, 1964). The gender dynamics of Harlem—the unwanted catcalls on the way to the subway directed at my wife—were increasingly uncomfortable; we needed more female eyes on the street (see Duneier and Carter, 1999; Patch, 2008). The constant moving, small spaces, and rotating roommates that had defined my housing demanded a flexibility for inconvenience. Inconveniences that are acceptable for one person do not make sense for a couple. After a year, my wife and I returned to Brooklyn where most of our friends were living. This time we moved to Sunset Park, which was euphemistically being labeled by real estate agents and gentrifiers as the South Slope because of its proximity to the symbolically-charged and long-gentrified Park Slope (see Carpenter and Lees, 1995). Sunset Park was a largely Latino neighborhood with Polish remnants and spillover gentrification from Park Slope. We spent 3 years there. We loved that time in our lives. We were close to friends, made new friends (also white and gentrifiers), and had access to a mix of bodegas, an old Polish grocery store, taquerías, new cafes, and new restaurants. After a decade in New York City we felt socialized, both as individuals and as a couple, to live in a city. The use of subways and buses, the space constraints, the close proximity to strangers, the sounds, the visual density all felt normal and comfortable to us. Our life seemed to be suited for the type of diverse, mixed-class, mixed-use, mixed-ethnic urban neighborhood that Jacobs (1961) celebrated. We were also enveloped by the friendly, quasiprimary relationships that Gans (1962) described between urban neighbors. The academic job market took us away from New York to the state of Rhode Island. This move created a wide-open opportunity to reconsider where exactly we would live: city, suburbs, or small town. Moving to Rhode Island, where the entire state population was less than Brooklyn’s, we wanted city life. And by city life we meant the diverse ethnic, class, and economic urban village we previously knew. We decided to live in Providence, the state’s largest town, as it would offer the best opportunity for my wife to also find employment and use public transportation. We found a rental apartment in a large pink Victorian-era house via Craigslist, in a neighborhood historically considered the little Italy of the city, but speckled with Guatemalan restaurants and Vietnamese Pho restaurants. When the tattooed young women in a rockabilly/punk outfit came out to greet us, it confirmed that we had socially and aesthetically found our place: diverse residents, diverse stores, and diverse uses. We saw the types of people and places that reminded us of where we had formerly lived. Aesthetically, socially, amenity-wise, and practically we wanted to live in the city. We know we are not alone in this and we know the aggregate challenges this can pose for the city.As a family, we wanted to stay in the city and in our neighborhood. This was the place where we lived, planned on

Chapter 6   Governance, Gentrification, and Neighborhoods   363

continuing to live, and felt an allegiance to. We purchased our own house in a historic district of Providence, a place with an increasing symbolic value. Our home was originally built in the 1870s, but by the 1970s it was boarded-up, covered with graffiti, and filled with outdated wiring and plumbing. In Providence in the 1980s, the Providence Revolving Fund designated the neighborhood around Dexter Training Ground park on the West Side as the key site for their plans to redevelop an architecturally significant district (see Smolski, 1978). Working with the city government, the Revolving Fund made investments in abandoned or derelict houses in the area. For our house, a swath of ceiling between the second floor kitchen and a converted attic was cut out to create a loft-like open space. A quarter of a century later, it was a certain type of ‘loft living’ and, having just arrived from New York, it appealed to us (Zukin, 1982). And here, as for Schlichtman, is where the diagnostic moment intensifies. Buying a house entailed making a different type of commitment. We consciously wanted to live in a socially diverse neighborhood by race/ ethnicity, class, age and family type.3 We looked at census data, walked around neighborhoods with an ethnographer’s eye, and talked with shop owners and residents. The methods I had used in my dissertation research I was now using to determine where to purchase a house. In thinking through the variables of our lives, we felt we had three living choices: life as gentrifiers, life as residents in a homogeneous white middle-class neighborhood, or life as suburbanites. We could not afford to economically, and perhaps socially, live in the wealthier (and whiter) neighborhoods on the East Side of Providence. The suburbs and the middle-class areas of Rhode Island feel segregated, undynamic, and unnatural to us. There is also the practical choice to live in this neighborhood, which was accessible via public transportation to my wife’s job. After 20 years of living in gentrifying neighborhoods, this type of place is still the pull for us. This is not about living on a ‘frontier;’ but rather within what we see as normal city life. However, something changed for us at this point. We became landlords. So we were not just thinking about paying our mortgage, but also thinking about rent. Our house purchase was economically premised on acquiring rental income from the first floor. We had become serendipitous place entrepreneurs (Logan and Molotch, 1987). How much rent did we need to bring in? How much rent could we ask for? Who did we want living with us? Here was a gentrifier-landlord’s dilemma: did our economic and social goals match? We worried about whether we would upset the cultural and class dynamics of our block by our decision. The terms of our mortgage required us to take a class on being landlords. The class, at a local housing non-profit, offered a primer in the politics of tenants and landlords. The dominant message of this class was that landlordtenant relations are fraught regardless of class, race or how personable the

364  PART II   The Challenges of Governing the Divided Metropolis landlord is. Strikingly, the central advice from the non-profit was to not befriend tenants, much less rent to a family member. One does not need to read Simmel’s The Philosophy of Money (1978) to realize that financial transactions alter human interactions. The class and racial tensions, the way price overlaps with power: these were issues I knew beforehand. But in determining who we would rent to we experienced them in a different manner. Now, I was watching this tension intersect with my biography by shaping who else could live in the neighborhood. Ultimately, we determined that stable interpersonal relationships trump any significant rent increase. We chose a tenant based on who we could comfortably live with. We used social class indicators. We advertised on Craigslist, appealing to people who search for housing online. Our rent was a bit lower than neighboring units. We described the apartment and neighborhood in terms that make sense to us—access to coffee shops, close to a park, gay friendly, and filled with children. But our advertisement targeted persons of roughly the same socio-demographic class with the same amenity and social needs: young families or couples, socially tolerant, and interested in a certain type of social spaces. Is consumption the gentrifier’s honey-trap (Mele, 2000; Lloyd, 2002; Deener, 2007)? Knowing local, independent coffee shops were in a location was a vital indicator for us that we could fit in, that there were eyes-on-thestreet and public characters around. We could see postings for local events, suss out the names of local clubs, and most importantly see and be seen by other people. One way we considered neighborhoods was by where we could eat, drink and hang-out, as these indicators of third-places also indicated city safety to us (see Oldenburg, 1997). We were looking for places that we could not find in a mall (a gated, part-time zone), a small New England town, or the suburbs. […] For us, the practical overlapped with the social. Places for consumption are tied to people. Like Benjamin and Tiedemann (1999), we want to walk and see people, to people watch in the coffee shops, restaurants and in the park. Do we provide ‘eyes-on-the-street’ à la Jacobs or act as bourgeois imperialists à la Smith’s (1996) critique? Or perhaps, as Jacobs preached, what we all love about city life is the opportunity to see friends and strangers on a daily basis, to have an interesting stream of human activity around. Young children play soccer in the street. I find myself like one of the old heads described so often in the urban literature who look out from my window to make sure everything is alright—the kids are safe, passersby walk along unharmed, strangers are acknowledged (Jacobs, 1961; Anderson, 1989; Duneier and Carter, 1999). As neighbors we see each other at the local park and eating at the weekly farmers market. I spent a summer teaching a teenage, immigrant neighbor how to drive and lent him my car to take his driving exam.

Chapter 6   Governance, Gentrification, and Neighborhoods   365

Gentrification is not a single storming of the city. It is an ongoing, complicated project intertwined with other processes. For as much as white, middle-class gentrification is part of the West Side of Providence, working-class Latinization (and also a growing Asian population) is the larger urban process (Laó-Montes and Dávila, 2001). Together, both may be part of the economic and cultural pressure on longer-term Italian and African-American residents. So we live in a pocket of gentrification within a larger field of Latino population growth. The two define the neighborhood. The majority of our neighbors are of the same social class as us, but they vary in age and family structure. We also have immigrant and low-income neighbors who rent in unrenovated buildings surrounded by asphalt-covered lots. Some of our neighbors are large families of refugees from Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia. Their rental housing units are the precarious leftovers of the pre-historic-district housing market. My family has three people living in two stories; these neighbors are multigenerational families living in as much space. Our presence as gentrifiers creates displacement pressures on the rental market. We like these neighbors and we hate seeing the housing conditions they live with and we charge a higher price for our own rental unit and we sometimes want someone to buy and renovate those buildings. […]

Gentrifier as a Four Letter Word […] Rose (1984: 62) suggested long ago that ‘the concepts “gentrification” and “gentrifier” need to be disaggregated’. We agree. Just as we do not ascribe the agency-laden term ‘capitalist’ to all individuals within capitalist systems who do not actively resist the system, it is not useful to ascribe to all middle-class residents within gentrifying neighborhoods the agency of being a ‘gentrifier’. We believe that this contradictory caricature developed concomitantly with the disconnect between our personal and scholarly lives. As we tried to fit the literature on gentrification into our own biographies here, we certainly embraced Beauregard’s (1986) nearly 3 decade-old warning that gentrification is a ‘chaotic conception’.

Closing Thoughts Our focus here was to use this limited space to locate ourselves—‘we live here’—and to urge our colleagues to do the same. Our interviewees need not be our only entree into the contradictions of gentrification. We must identify

366  PART II   The Challenges of Governing the Divided Metropolis ourselves in the literature if that literature is going to make meaningful streetlevel value interventions. Brown-Saracino (2010: 360) in her edited volume, a culmination of this chaotic sub-field, writes that the book is meant to inform ‘our relations with one another’. One must be vulnerable in building relations, a task that was not always easy even for these old friends who were not exempt from finger-pointing. However, we must do this if we are to ‘demarcate and … politicize the strategically essential possibilities for more progressive, socially just, emancipatory and sustainable formations for urban life’, as the critical approach demands (Brenner et al., 2009: 179). And so we ask you to join us: you’re an urbanist, where do you live?

Notes   1

‘Gentrification’ was a term that I did not fully understand as I was not yet studying the city: my now co-author actually explained it to me at that time.   2 Incidentally, in our final year in the city, we did find some black communities in the outlying areas of the county that we considered to be vibrant, communities with strong community activity and some class integration.   3 While in many circles education is praised because it increases one’s appreciation of diversity, Schlichtman and Patch encounter critiques of this current work suggesting that we only really appreciate diversity because we are educated.

References Achtenberg, E.P. and P. Marcuse (1986) Toward the decommodification of housing. In R. Bratt, C. Hartman and A. Meyerson (eds.), Critical perspectives on housing, Temple University Press, Philadelphia, PA. Anderson, E. (1989) Street wise: race, class, and change in an urban community. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL. Anderson, L. (2006) Analytic autoethnography. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 35.3, 373–95. Aronowitz, N.W. (2012) How the recession made me a gentrifier in my home town. The Atlantic Cities 15 June [WWW Document] URL http://www. theatlanticcities. com/neighborhoods/2012/ 06/how-recession-has-made-me-gentrifier -my-hometown/2289/ (accessed 23 January 2013). Beauregard, R. (1986) The chaos and complexity of gentrification. In N. Smith and P. Williams (eds.), entrification of the city, Allen & Unwin, Boston, MA. Benjamin, W. and R. Tiedemann (1999) The arcades project. Belknap Press, Cambridge, MA. Blomley, N. (2004. Unsettling the city: urban land and the politics of property. Routledge, New York. Bondi, L. (1999) Gender, class, and gentrification: enriching the debate. Environment and Planning D: Society & Space 17.2, 261–82.

Chapter 6   Governance, Gentrification, and Neighborhoods   367 Brenner, N., P. Marcuse and M. Mayer (2009) Cities for people, not for profit. City 13.2/3, 176–84. Brown-Saracino, J. (2004) Social preservationists and the quest for authentic community. City and Community 3.2, 135–47. Brown-Saracino, J. (2009) A neighborhood that never changes: gentrification, social preservation, and the search for authenticity. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL. Brown-Saracino, J. (2010) The gentrification debates. Routledge, New York. Burnier, D. (2006) Encounters with self in social science research: a political scientist looks at autoethnography. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 35.4, 410–18. Butler, T. (1997) Gentrification and the middle classes. Ashgate, Aldershot. Carpenter, J. and L. Lees (1995) Gentrification in New York, London and Paris—an international comparison. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 19.2, 286–303. Cooley, C.H. (1902) Human nature and the social order. Scribner, New York. Davies, C.A. (1999. Reflexive ethnography: a guide to researching selves and others. Routledge, London. Davis, M., J. Miller and K. Mayhew (2003) Under the perfect sun: the San Diego tourists never see. New Press, New York. Deener, A (2007) Commerce as the structure and symbol of neighborhood life reshaping the meaning of community in Venice, California. City & Community 6.4, 291–314. Duneier, M. and O. Carter (1999) Sidewalk. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York. Ellis, C.S. and A.P. Bochner (2006) Analyzing analytic autoethnography: an autopsy. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 35.4, 429–49. Erie, S.P., V. Kogan and S.A. MacKenzie (2011) Paradise plundered: fiscal crisis and governance failures in San Diego. Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA. Fischer, C.S (1982. To dwell among friends: personal networks in town and city. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL. Florida, R.L (2008. Who’s your city? How the creative economy is making where to live the most important decision of your life. Basic Books, New York. Frech, K.R., J. Patch, Local Chaos and Cinema Guild (2004) Bowery dish: how restaurants changed skid row. Logical Chaos, New York. Gans, H.J (1962). The urban villagers: group and class in the life of Italian-Americans. Free Press of Glencoe, New York. Geertz, C. (1988) Works and lives: the anthropologist as author. Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA. Giddens, A. (1984) The constitution of society: outline of the theory of structuration. University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA. Glass, R.L (1964) London: aspects of change. University College London, Centre for Urban Studies and MacGibbon & Keel, London. Grazian, D. (2003) Blue Chicago: the search for authenticity in urban blues clubs. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL. Hamnett, C. (2010) ‘I am critical. You are mainstream’: a response to Slater. City 14.1, 180–86. Huxtable, A.L. (1997) The unreal America: architecture and illusion. The New Press, New York. Jacobs, J. (1961) The death and life of great American cities. Random House, New York.

368  PART II   The Challenges of Governing the Divided Metropolis Krieger, S. (1991) Social science and the self: personal essays on an art form. Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, NJ. Laó-Montes, A. and A.M. Dávila (2001) Mambo montage: the Latinization of New York. Columbia University Press, New York. Lloyd, R. (2002) Neo-bohemia: art and neighborhood redevelopment in Chicago. Journal of Urban Affairs 24.5, 517–32. Lloyd, R. (2006) Neo-bohemia: art and commerce in the postindustrial city. Routledge, New York. Logan, J.R. and H.L. Molotch (1987) Urban fortunes: the political economy of place. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA. Lynch, K. (1960) The image of the city. Technology Press, Cambridge, MA. Marcuse, P. (1985) Gentrification, abandonment and displacement connections, causes and policy responses in New York City. Journal of Urban and Contemporary Law 28.107, 195–240. Marcuse, P. (2010) A note from Peter Marcuse. City 14.1/2, 187–88. Maso, I (2001) Phenomenology and ethnography. In P. Atkinson, D. Delamont, J. Lofland and L. Lofland (eds.), Handbook of ethnography, Sage, Thousand Oaks, CA. Mele, C. (2000) Selling the Lower East Side: culture, real estate, and resistance in New York City. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN. Nygreen, K. (2009) Critical dilemmas in PAR: toward a new theory of engaged research for social change. Social Justice 36.1, 14–35. Oldenburg, R. (1997) The great good place: cafés, coffee shops, community centers, beauty parlors, general stores, bars, hangouts, and how they get you through the day. Marlowe & Co, New York. Park, R.E., E.W. Burgess, R.D. McKenzie and L. Wirth (1925) The city. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL. Patch, J. (2004) The embedded landscape of gentrification. Visual Studies 19.2, 169–86. Patch, J. (2008) Ladies and gentrification: new stores, residents, and relationships in neighborhood change. In J. Desena (ed.), Gender in an urban world, Emerald, Bingley. Patch, J. and N. Brenner (2007) Gentrification. In G. Ritzer (ed.), Encyclopedia of sociology, Blackwell, Oxford. Pattillo, M.E (2007) Black on the block: the politics of race and class in the city. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL. Rose, D (1984) Rethinking gentrification: beyond the uneven development of Marxist urban theory. Environment and Planning D: Society & Space 1.1, 57–69. Rose, D (2004) Discourses and experiences of social mix in gentrifying neighborhoods: a Montreal case study. Canadian Journal of Urban Research 13.2, 278–316. Sassen, S. (1991. The global city: New York, London, Tokyo. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ. Segal, S.P. and J. Baumohl (1988) No place like home: reflections on sheltering a diverse population. In J.A. Giggs and C.J. Smith (eds.), Location and stigma contemporary perspectives on mental health and mental health care, Allen & Unwin, London. Simmel, G. (1964) Conflict. Free Press, New York. Simmel, G. (1978) The philosophy of money. Routledge & Kegan Paul, Boston and London. Slater, T. (2006) The eviction of critical perspectives from gentrification research. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 30.4, 737–57.

Chapter 6   Governance, Gentrification, and Neighborhoods   369 Slater, T. (2010) Still missing Marcuse: Hamnett’s foggy analysis in London town. City 14.4, 170–79. Smith, N. (1996) The new urban frontier: gentrification and the revanchist city. Routledge, London. Smolski, C. (1978) Gentrification—urban movement, but small. [WWW document] URL http://digitalcommons.ric.edu/smolskitext/69 (accessed 20 February). Taylor, M.M (2002) Harlem between heaven and hell. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN. Turner, V. (1967) The forest of symbols. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY. Wacquant, L. (2009) The body, the ghetto and the penal state. Qualitative Sociology 32.1, 101–29. Warde, A. (1991) Gentrification as consumption: issues of class and gender. Environment and Planning D: Society & Space 9.2, 223–32. Zukin, S. (1982) Loft living: culture and capital in urban change. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD. Zukin, S. (1987) Gentrification: culture and capital in the urban core. Annual Review of Sociology 13.1, 129–47.

PART III Crises and Ways Forward

CHAPTER 7 The Year 2020 and Its Aftermath

Editors’ Introduction The year 2020 will be the sort of year that historians will write and speak about for generations to come. It was a devastating, traumatizing, fearful year for people around the world, but its devastation was particularly visible in cities. As the COVID-19 pandemic began to take hold of the country, big media outlets and private social media feeds showed wild animals taking back the streets of the country’s biggest cities, as humans withdrew into private spaces, or left cities altogether. A recent study by the Brookings Institution found that cities with populations over 250,000 had on average lost 1% of their respective populations during the 2021 calendar year – a historic loss during a period of steady urbanization. New York City became the country’s early epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic. By mid-March 2020, the City That Never Sleeps had fallen into an eerie coma of sorts, its streets so silent that one could hear birds sing in midtown Manhattan. That silence was only pierced by the siren sounds of ambulances rushing to save yet another person from COVID—so often in vain. By April, the city’s hospitals were breaking under the pandemic onslaught of illness and death. Cooling trucks became temporary storage spaces for the bodies of the dead, violently catapulting medieval imagery of disease outbreaks into the present day. In Selection 21, Dan Barry and Annie Correal pay tribute to those who lost their lives in early-pandemic New York City. Their honest, raw piece chronicles the early outbreak of COVID-19 in the “epicenter of the epicenter”—the intersection of five neighborhoods (Woodside, Elmhurst, DOI: 10.4324/9781315163635-10373

374  PART III    Crises and Ways Forward East Elmhurst, Jackson Heights, and Corona) in Queens, in which worlds converge. The country’s most diverse zip code (according to National Geographic), 11373, is home to blue-collar immigrants from around the world, many of them working in essential professions, many of them living in overcrowded housing, many of them undocumented: “If lucky, they live with family or friends; if not, they live among strangers paying for a bed or maybe just a couch” write Barry and Correal, underscoring the ease with which COVID would burn through the community in Queens. Elmhurst Hospital Center, which is located in the neighborhood, would be the first to feel the hard cold pressure of the pandemic, the first to be at 230% capacity in March 2020, the first to need the cooling trucks, the first to experience utter desperation from COVID-19. Chronicling, day by day, individual by individual, the impact of the pandemic on this vulnerable neighborhood, Barry and Correal create a devastating portrait of New Yorkers during the early days of the pandemic—and point out how social disadvantage contributed to their vulnerability. In Selection 22, Berkowitz et al. take a more systematic approach to what Barry and Correal chronicle in their piece. They link structural racism, segregation and disinvestment to increased and sustained COVID vulnerability along the lines of specific factors. They identify structurally vulnerable neighborhoods as those with a long history of disinvestment, those that are populated by populations of color that have experienced discriminatory policy, neglect, and uneven development, and those inhabited by populations vulnerable to further displacement. Berkowitz et al. explain how it is these neighborhood and social conditions (rooted in racist policies) that lead to increased COVID-19 comorbidities and mortality. They argue that unless racism-based inequalities are addressed, these health inequities will continue to persist. The authors recommend the implementation of policies that specifically address structural neighborhood vulnerability as a first step in combatting health inequities. They note that COVID-19 is not unique in capitalizing on structural vulnerability and institutional racism, and urge local, state, and federal governments to more seriously address health disparities. Selection 23 provides a close-up look at risk factors for COVID based on zip code in April 2020. This granular analysis from the Furman Center at NYU early on the pandemic outbreak in NYC allows one to parse out which specific factors put communities at a risk for COVID-19—and which ones did not. This research shows that even at the beginning of the pandemic, Hispanics and African Americans were disproportionately affected. It also presents some findings that may come as a surprise to early pessimists about the future of cities under COVID: public transit usage and urban population density were not positively correlated with higher COVID-19 incidences. Living in overcrowded housing, on the other hand, and people’s inability

Chapter 7   The Year 2020 and Its Aftermath   375

to work from home, was positively associated with higher rates of COVID infections. These findings underscore once again what has been laid out in different ways in Selections 21 and 22: poverty, historical disadvantage, racism, discrimination, segregation, and social polarization make certain communities disproportionately more vulnerable to COVID-19. In other words, the pandemic laid bare existing inequalities in new and more urgent ways. We have yet to address these inequalities in meaningful ways, but the research from the Furman Center provides an important basis for action. This chapter also addresses one additional complex of issues, which had by no means been resolved, but returned to the national political debate in 2020: Policing and police tactics. The murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, which was not the first by far, but among the most well-documented killings of people of color by police, sparked protests in cities across the country and around the world against the treatment of people of color by the police. Thanks to a cell phone video taken at the scene, people from around the world could watch the footage of Derek Chauvin kneeling on George Floyd’s neck during an arrest for over nine minutes, supposedly to “subdue” him, even though Floyd did not resist arrest, mentioned more than ten times that he could not breathe, and was unconscious for at least the last of the nine minutes during which Chauvin knelt on his neck. George Floyd died of cardiopulmonary arrest about nine minutes later. The protests that followed resulted in serious and violent clashes between demonstrators and the police, which, in turn, resulted in a number of cities investigating the policing tactics of their police departments. Reports that looked into policing tactics in nine major cities throughout the United States, uniformly argue that police require more training, and need to work in closer collaboration with community leaders, activists, and civil rights attorneys (Barker et al. 2021). The reports also found what experts have been warning about for years: Police in American cities have increasingly been militarized with “riot gear” and ammunition that is used by the military in wars, not by the state against its people. The reports also suggest that police officers need to be trained to engage in conversations and discussions with protesters to establish a dialogue rather than engage in physical conflict. Avid watchers of the television series The Wire, which takes place in Baltimore and does not show the BPD in the most favorable of lights, may be surprised to read that the Baltimore police department was credited with performing reasonably well by comparison: As a group of New York Times journalists report, “the [Baltimore police] department deployed officers in ordinary uniforms [as opposed to riot gear] and encouraged them to ‘calmly engage in discussion with protesters’ “[…]’” (Barker et al. 2021). In Selection 24, Jenna M. Loyd and Anne Bonds explore policing and policymaking around Black Lives in an important single-case study: They examine zip code 53206, which is located in the city of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, one of

376  PART III    Crises and Ways Forward the most segregated cities in the country. The authors use 53206 as a metaphor of territorial stigmatization: Decades of disinvestment, segregation, segregation, and restructuring in the education and welfare sectors have left the zip code deeply marginalized. In policy and policing, however, tropes like “Black-on-Black crime,” broken homes and windows, and a lack of structure and care within Black communities, are employed on all sides of the political spectrum and largely obscure the role that institutions had in this process. The authors use the term territorial stigmatization to describe how urban neighborhoods are easily labeled as “lost causes” without a critical examination of the institutionalized mechanisms of capitalism and racism as causes for their demise. All of the pieces in this chapter draw attention to the historical marginalization of communities, which has resulted in severely restricting their access not only to social upward mobility and generational wealth but also to safe and healthy housing conditions and to trustworthy institutions. After 2020, we still have a long way to go toward social equity and social justice.

Reference Barker, Kim, Mike Baker, Ali Watkins. 2021. “In after city, police mishandled Black Lives Matter protests.” The New York Times, June 28, 2021. Accessed online: https://www. nytimes.com/2021/03/20/us/­protests-policing-george-floyd.html

21 The Epicenter Dan Barry, Annie Correal and Todd Heisler* She wears a red wig and a black dress she sewed herself. It hugs her body as she moves about the stage, lip-syncing love songs in Spanish to a room filled mostly with absence. It is late on March 9, and Yimel Alvarado is at her regular Monday gig, a nightclub above a Mexican restaurant in theCorona section of Queens. This is where she feels at home, where the usually robust crowds of gay and transgender patrons applaud her teasing banter. Drink up, she often says, as fans toss money at her feet. The night is getting away.

* From The New York Times. © 2020 The New York Times Company. All rights reserved. Used under license. https://www.nytimes.com/international/ Barry, Dan; Correal, Annie; Heisler, Todd, ‘The Epicenter’, The New York Times, 03 December 2020

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But Yimel is not herself tonight; hasn’t been for days. Her Cleopatra-like eyeliner only accentuates the exhaustion in her gaze. Just a cold, she says. At some point, the concerned bar owner reaches for the tequila. The two friends knock back shots while, nearby, a few spare patrons kiss and huddle for cellphone selfies. The same denial and dread hover over the densely populated neighborhoods beyond the restaurant’s door, inside apartments subdivided by drywall and need, up and down the bustle of Roosevelt Avenue. In one building, an immigrant from Ecuador worries about the many relatives living in her cramped apartment, including her frail parents. A family member, her brother-in-law, has a persistent cough. In another, a couple from Bangladesh gets a call from their daughter in her Ivy League dorm, who warns that they risk illness by going to work and sharing close air with strangers—her mother at La Guardia Airport, her father in his yellow cab. She begs them to stay home. They do not. But an Uber driver is so haunted by the coughing of two recent passengers that he has stopped picking up fares. Thirty years ago in Nepal, he fled his life as a Buddhist monk, tossing his red robe under a tree. Now he prays as he disinfects his black Toyota. Around the corner, a Thai chef who commutes by subway to Manhattan has been sending worried texts from work to his less-concerned partner at home. He frets about the growing number of confirmed cases in the United States. Is it here? The deadly coronavirus? At Elmhurst Hospital a short walk away, an emergency-room doctor has noticed a surge of patients with flulike symptoms. Now there is confirmation of what she and her colleagues knew was inevitable: the hospital’s first case of Covid-19, the life-threatening illness caused by the coronavirus. It is here. But messages conflict. Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo has declared a state of emergency, while President Trump continues to downplay the virus. A “containment area” is about to be established in the small city of New Rochelle, while a dozen miles south the hurried hustle of Manhattan flows uninterrupted. Soon, this pinpoint on the map of Queens, where so many cultures converge, will become the global epicenter of the kind of health crisis not seen in the United States in a century. Very soon. For now, the weary-eyed Yimel Alvarado continues her performance, fortified by little more than the dose of tequila. Determined but unwell, she mouths a ballad in which a woman addresses the wife of her lover. Ahora es tarde, señora Too late now, señora. — Just about two miles separate the 69th and 103rd Street stops on the 7 train in northern Queens. Yet beneath its elevated tracks sprawls the world.

378  PART III    Crises and Ways Forward Within this span are five neighborhoods in the Queens jigsaw— Woodside, Elmhurst, East Elmhurst, Jackson Heights and Corona—whose combined histories reflect the evolution of New York: the Dutch and English settlements and the fields of wheat and corn, the railroad lines and the sprouting developments, the garden apartments for white Protestants only and the ash heaps immortalized in “The Great Gatsby.” Then housing for the masses, the faces ever changing. To walk down Roosevelt Avenue now is to journey from the Himalayan peaks to the arid Mexican plains, to hear the music of intermingled languages and dialects, all within three dozen short blocks. In the perpetual dusk cast by the subway tracks above, vendors sell woven baskets from Ecuador and leather sandals from Mexico, while Indian grocers display their produce and men carry skinned goats to halal butchers. Dentists and doctors offer their services from narrow storefronts, as do selfproclaimed healers, the curanderos, found among the statues and candles in religious-goods stores, available for counsel. The lively rhythms of the street follow the percussive beat of cumbia, the thump of reggaeton, the call to prayer. Fueling it all is an international buffet of the sizzling meat tacos of southern Mexico, the steamed dumplings of Nepal, the Indian curries, the Peruvian ceviche, the Colombian buñuelos. And everywhere, people. Many work the service jobs that animate the city: driving, cleaning, cooking, building—up at first light to line the subway platforms, hard hats and coffee cups in hand. Many are distrustful of authorities, or vulnerable to exploitation, or simply too afraid to call in sick. By the tens of thousands, they spill from brick tenements with narrow courtyards, from small houses with grapevine gardens, from basement quarters with little natural light. If lucky, they live with family or friends; if not, they live among strangers, paying for a bed or maybe just a couch. Imperfect conditions for social distancing. Perfect for contagion. Saturday, March 14 ‘This virus has spread much more than we know.’ Yimel Alvarado lies sick in the gloom of her tiny bedroom, a crucifix on the wall above her head. Pink satin curtains are drawn against the lateafternoon light, five days after her cabaret performance in the upstairs lounge at El Trio restaurant. Since then, a low-grade panic has taken hold in the city outside her modest Jackson Heights apartment. The subway turnstiles are being disinfected twice a day. The Diocese of Brooklyn has suspended Sunday Mass obligations for Catholics. The New York Police Department has alerted all of its precincts that Covid-19 is now categorized as a pandemic. Capt. Jonathan Cermeli, the commanding officer of the 110th Precinct in Elmhurst, cannot believe the abrupt change in events. Only a week ago, at a 12th birthday party for his son, friends were discussing an issue that seemed entirely unrelated to their lives.

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You guys hear about this virus? Now Mayor Bill de Blasio has declared a state of emergency. His office will say it was in frequent contact with the city’s hospitals and regularly briefed elected officials and the public. But two local City Council members, Francisco Moya and Daniel Dromm, complain of receiving little guidance from City Hall. “We felt like we were on our own,” Mr. Moya will later say. Yimel, 40, is also on her own. Like so many undocumented immigrants, she has no health insurance, no primary-care physician to call. She has been refusing offers of help from her roommates—who see her as their nurturing mother—and has barely let on to family in Mexico that she is sick. She has relied on prayer and citrusinfused tea to treat what she has been sarcastically calling her blessed cough. But now the woman always up for a sassy selfie is not answering her phone, and her text about a cough has spooked her younger sister in the Bronx, Olivia Aldama, who senses what this means: Her beloved Chiquis is sick. Olivia, 34, finishes her shift at a dry cleaners and hurries by subway to Jackson Heights. She enters Yimel’s darkened bedroom to find her sister moaning in her sleep, her cellphone buried in the sheets. Her breathing is labored, her lips parched, her tongue like white paper; she needs to go to the hospital. I’m here, Olivia says, hugging her. I’m here now. Olivia may not know everything about the sibling in her arms. That Yimel slept on the streets when she arrived in New York about 20 years ago. That she was a sex worker, enduring verbal and physical attacks under the elevated tracks in Jackson Heights. That she may still be. What Olivia knows is that her sister was identified at birth as a boy—a gender that Yimel later realized did not fit, but which she and her family still discuss as part of her past. Growing up in Tlapa de Comonfort, a city in the mountains of southern Mexico, the child preferred playing dress-up with the family’s four daughters, incurring the wrath of their father. Tensions built up over the years until, one day, brimming with drink and shame, the man pulled out a knife and shouted, Kill yourself! The only choice was to flee. But before being spirited across the border by smugglers, the teenager joined her mother in the cool of the Basilica of Guadalupe in Mexico City. There, the mother entrusted her own to the Virgin. The new immigrant eventually found acceptance in Jackson Heights among gay and transgender people who had also fled intolerance in Latin America, and blossomed into Yimel Alvarado, who found her calling as an entertainer in the gay clubs around Roosevelt Avenue. She has also become the bawdy, big-hearted matriarch of what is known as the Familia Alvarado, a tight-knit group whose members she has fed,

380  PART III    Crises and Ways Forward clothed, counseled and often taken in. Over her apartment door hangs a sign that reassures: We Are So Good Together. In recent years, though, Yimel has been going out less, gaining weight and drinking more. She often stays here in her bedroom, creating her glamorous outfits at a sewing machine, or sketching dress designs in a notebook. She also jots down comforting aphorisms she comes across. Before giving up, try And before dying, LIVE Now, as Olivia struggles to help her sister sit up, a young Salvadoran man knocks on the door. He has been living in the apartment, sleeping on the couch, since Yimel learned that he was robbed at a homeless shelter. Together they dress and guide the delirious Yimel toward the stairs. She sits and begins to ease herself down the steps, one by one—only to stop, exhausted. A taxi is called. But the driver, suspecting that the woman slumped on the stairs has the virus, apologizes and leaves. In a fleeting moment of clarity, Yimel speaks: Call an ambulance. — The ambulance carrying another possible Covid case pulls up to the trauma entrance of Elmhurst Hospital. The salmon-colored colossus traces its roots back nearly two centuries to a penitentiary hospital on what is now called Roosevelt Island, which treated the incarcerated, the poor and the neglected long before this 11-story complex opened in 1957. Others might see a drab municipal hospital short on amenities, tending to mostly the disadvantaged and uninsured. But Dr. Laura Iavicoli, 49, considers her safety-net hospital to be “the most magical place on earth,” with a skilled, committed staff and a diverse mix of patients who offer fresh challenges every day. Every day, more emergency department space needs to be repurposed as isolation zones. The area reserved for treating coughs and minor cuts is now Covid. The critical care area, originally with seven beds, will soon have 20, all for Covid. Green oxygen hoses snake across the floor, while blue air-filter hoses rise to the ceiling. Sick people cluster at the entrance, slouch in chairs, lie on stretchers along the dull pink walls. Now paramedics in protective suits wheel in another: Yimel Alvarado. She is placed on a bed in the hallway, next to a young woman holding her stomach and crying out in agony. Briefly snapped from her delirium, Yimel looks over with evident compassion, but soon she is gone again, speaking in the language of hallucination as she stares at the hospital monitors in the corridor: That’s why I don’t watch television. They keep changing the channel. Without the oxygen she received in the ambulance, Yimel becomes weaker. A sip of water causes her to convulse in coughs, sending Olivia

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running for help. A nurse rushes over to check the oxygenation of Yimel’s blood. Several hospital workers are soon gathered around Yimel. First in English, then in Spanish, they ask: Have you traveled? Have you had a cough? Have you had a high fever? For how long? Olivia repeats the answers she heard her sister give to paramedics in the ambulance: No. Yes. Yes. Four days. Yimel is wheeled beyond a set of glass doors. Hours later, a doctor emerges to inform Olivia that her sister is in critical condition with pneumonia and would be dead if she hadn’t been brought to the hospital. Five days ago, Yimel was performing at a nightclub; now she is in intensive care. By morning she will be unconscious, intubated and encased in a plastic tent. Earlier on this Saturday, Mr. Trump asserted that the country’s relatively low number of coronavirus-related deaths—about 50 so far, he said—was because of “a lot of good decisions.” Tomorrow he will describe the virus as “something that we have tremendous control of.” But these upbeat assertions belie what is being experienced at Elmhurst Hospital, where Covid cases and flulike illnesses continue their ominous rise. Near midnight, Dr. Iavicoli talks by phone with two other emergency department supervisors, Dr. Stuart Kessler and Dr. Phillip Fairweather, to assess the damage of another harrowing day. Dr. Iavicoli, who has expertise in emergency management, recommends an aggressive requirement that emergency department staff wear full personal protective equipment—gown, gloves, goggles and N95 mask—at all times. The three doctors agree. Now the entire department is officially a “hot zone,” based on a new assumption: Everyone is likely to have Covid. Wednesday, March 18 ‘I do want people to be calm, because we’re going to win this.’ A stillness settles over the city. Events by which New York measures time—the St. Patrick’s Day Parade, for one—have been canceled. Schools for more than a million students are closed. Religious services are suspended. Transit hubs are empty. Skyscrapers are vacant. Broadway is dark. Coursing through the quiet is a palpable anxiety, a collective bracing for the blow to come. In the upstairs apartment of a two-family house in Woodside, Dawa Sherpa, the Uber driver from Nepal, tries to scrub away what he cannot see but fears is present. He cleans the stairwell, where the shoes of his three sons, 18, 13 and 6, form a neat row up the steps. He cleans the bedrooms, the kitchen and the living room, which features a torn map of the subway system and a large Buddhist shrine with three key figures: Shakyamuni Buddha, Guru Rinpoche and Chenrezig.

382  PART III    Crises and Ways Forward On the altar sit seven silver bowls that are filled with water in the morning and emptied at night, a silver chalice brimming with an offering of amber-colored tea—and a large bottle of hand sanitizer. Dawa is 50, short and husky, his black hair flecked with gray. Born in a speck of a farming village on a mountaintop in the Himalayas, he moved with his family to Kathmandu, then was sent at the age of 10 to a Buddhist monastery, where life became a spiritual boot camp of prayer, chores and study. Failure to know one’s lessons could result in a beating. When he was about 20, he jumped over a monastery wall to see what was going on in the world. He never returned. The former monk traveled to China to help his father’s import business, then to Japan, where he worked at a Toyota factory, and then, in 1996, to the United States, which he understood to be “a freedom country.” He gravitated toward Jackson Heights, married Sita Rai, a woman he had met at a wedding in Kathmandu, and began assembling a familiar immigrant résumé: clerk in a school-supply store; cook in a Chinese restaurant; driver for a manufacturing firm; delivery man for Domino’s Pizza; taxi driver, working a 12-hour overnight shift. Four years ago, Dawa switched to driving for Uber, shuttling customers around the tristate area in his black Toyota S.U.V. In recent weeks, he has listened constantly to the news radio station 1010 WINS in his car for updates on thepandemic’s progression. Then, two weeks ago, two customers coughed in his back seat. He drove home and systematically wiped down the seats, the door handles, everything, in mists of Lysol spray. He hasn’t driven for Uber since. And it may be a trick of the mind, but Dawa does not feel 100 percent. Friday, March 20 ‘We have not gone through something like this across our whole city in generations.’ In a brick building in Corona, 11 members of an extended family from Ecuador, young and old, live in a three-bedroom apartment. Two are sick: Rosa Lema, 41, with a fever, and her brother-in-law, with a violent cough. Now, late this afternoon—on a day when Mr. Cuomo announces a shutdown for much of the state—Rosa is notified by telephone that her mother, Vicenta Flores, has fainted during a dialysis session at Elmhurst Hospital, and a family member needs to take her to the emergency room. Rosa, a petite woman with high cheekbones and sleek dark hair, spent days disinfecting the kitchen and the well-trafficked bathroom, with its shower handle for her parents to grip. She encouraged her mother, who is 77, to stay in her small room between dialysis appointments, and bought sugar-free Robitussin for diabetics to treat what she thought was her mother’s minor cold. These precautions were futile. Rosa calls her brother Jorge, who lives nearby. He rushes to the hospital.

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It was never the plan to jam so many people into Rosa’s apartment. To stuff the living room bookshelves with clothes. To pile dusty boots and sparkly children’s shoes outside the front door. But a few months ago, Rosa’s sister Carmen and her family appeared at her door in Red Cross blankets after losing their home in a fire. So now six adults, five children, two cats and a dog live packed together, amid the discarded baubles that Vicenta has picked up while collecting cans for deposit money, which she sends to her mother in Ecuador. Jorge calls back, worried; a line of more than 100 people is unspooling from the emergency room. Rosa tells him to alert the hospital staff that their mother is in a wheelchair, sick and listless. Soon Rosa’s brother calls again, this time with a doctor who has questions. Has Vicenta had a fever? Has anyone else in the family been ill? Yes. Both Rosa and her mother have not been feeling well. But if her mother has contracted the virus, Rosa wonders where. At the dialysis clinic? During visits to another Queens hospital where her 83-year-old husband, José Redentor Lema—Rosa’s father—had been recovering after complications from pancreatic surgery? What about the living room, where Vicenta sits during the day, playing with the cats or stroking her granddaughters’ ponytails? At night the sofas become beds for Rosa’s sister, her husband and their twins; he is a tile layer who became ill when the virus swept through his construction crew. At Elmhurst, hospital workers lift her mother onto a bed and wheel her away, leaving Jorge to take in the long trail of the sick and worried, some so depleted they are lying on the ground. Rosa thinks about their mother’s toughness. Cooking corn cakes over open flames for the family in their hometown, Biblián. Raising six children while her husband traveled the country building roads. Then, when her children emigrated to the United States, raising some of their children. Once she was in Queens, the tiny woman, not five feet tall, learned to navigate the big-city streets as she collected cans. She even emerged from a six-week coma after being struck by a car. Ella va a estar bien. This is what Rosa will tell her siblings. She will be fine. But what will she tell her father, who has recently been moved to a rehabilitation center? He is so attached to his wife of 52 years that he always asks the same thing if she is even a minute late coming home. Where is Vicenta? Where is Vicenta? Saturday, March 21 ‘NYC: I need you to stay home.’ A mile and a half away in Woodside, in another brick apartment building, Jack Wongserat, the chef, has shared his fears of the coronavirus with his partner, Joe Farris, who has not been as anxious. Until now. Jack has a 103-degree fever.

384  PART III    Crises and Ways Forward Theirs has been a New York romance: A Thai immigrant named Jack, short and compact, meets an Alabama native named Joe, tall and thin, in a bar on the Bowery in 2005. They engage in the pro forma exchange of telephone numbers, but then Jack surprises Joe by calling. “He courted me,” Joe says. In the city’s close-knit community of Thai cuisine, Jack, 53, is known as exacting but nurturing: rigid about hygiene and promptness and then, after the last curried dish has been served, available for a glass of Riesling and an encouraging chat with colleagues new to America. Drawing on his own life—born in the Thai city of Ubon Ratchathani, losing both parents when he was young, emigrating in 1990 with no prospects—Jack tells them to be strong. He spins stories about his luck at casinos, and invites them to watch his beloved Giants and share spicy food he has cooked that will taste like home. They nickname him Mama. His partner, Joe, 58, grew up in the small city of Jasper and studied music at the University of Alabama. He taught English in Taiwan for a year, then moved in the early ’90s to New York. After a long stretch waiting tables, he shifted to market research, and now works as a project manager from the apartment he has shared with Jack for two years. In one corner are Jack’s small shrine to the Buddha and a mismatched collection of china for the restaurant he hopes to open one day. In another corner sits the digital piano he bought for Joe to reignite his passion for music. Now, on this Saturday morning, Jack is texting Joe from their bedroom. 11:43 a.m.: My test is positive 11:43 a.m.: Dr. said drink more water 11:45 a.m.: Take the Virus medicine 11:50 a.m.: Start separating fork spoon 11:50 a.m.: Use the mask protection 11:50 a.m.: Every time 12:07 p.m.: Sorry about that Monday, March 23 ‘The hardship will end. It will end soon. Normal life will return.’ The skies are leaden, a wintry mix falling. All in keeping with the mood of Queens. Inside Elmhurst Hospital, Vicenta Flores is on a ventilator, unconscious and alone. Visitors are not allowed, but many in her family’s small apartment in Corona are too sick to see her anyway, including two grandchildren sharing a nebulizer meant for asthma. Rosa Lema, Vicenta’s daughter, is so ill that she has gotten tested for the coronavirus. Meanwhile, the entertainer Yimel Alvarado remains sedated and on a ventilator in her clear plastic cocoon. With the help of an English-speaking

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member of the Familia Alvarado, her sister Olivia has been calling twice a day to check on Yimel, whose own test result has finally come in: positive. Covid cases have all but overtaken the emergency department. Just weeks ago, the prevailing wisdom held that the hospital’s four negative-pressure isolation rooms could handle whatever infectious cases came in. The thought now seems absurd. Tuesday, March 24 ‘The number of new cases continues to increase unabated.’ Less than a mile to the north, in East Elmhurst, Mahdia Chowdhury is home from Cornell University and losing sleep in her family’s small secondfloor apartment, in the bedroom she shares with her two teenage brothers. Outside, the ambulances are so common that at night their lights paint her bedroom ceiling red. Inside, her father, Shamsul, is getting sicker by the day. A few days ago, he stopped going to his mosque and returned the yellow Toyota Prius that he leased with a partner to a taxi garage in Long Island City, as she had begged him to do because of risks to his health. Too late. Now, every night, he comes to her room to ask whether his “dysentery”— his term for a fever and diarrhea—means that he has Covid. No, she fibs to reassure him. You’re fine. Although her parents sleep in the same bed, Mahdia is not as worried about her mother, Tarana, 47, who still works serving food and cleaning up in the United Airlines lounge at nearby La Guardia Airport. It is mostly empty now, the once-constant roar of jets overhead all but silenced. Her father is the one who concerns her. Setting aside her college assignments to research Covid symptoms, she has become convinced that he is infected and, as a diabetic and smoker, at great risk. He is 48. Just days ago, Mahdia was in the library of her hilly campus 240 miles away, cramming for midterm exams. Now she lies awake as her brothers sleep. Shamsul seems weaker. He scarcely touches the rice the family leaves outside his bedroom door, beneath a talisman of a blue eye meant to ward off evil. She thinks about their father’s quiet sacrifices. In the Bangladeshi city of Sylhet, he owned land and had a master’s degree. He was part of the privileged class. The earnest and meticulous Shamsul gave all this up in 2009 to provide more opportunity for his children in the United States, where, instead of managing operations at a bank in Sylhet, he took Mahdia and her brothers to school every morning in the taxi he drove 10 hours a day. He no longer seems as depressed as when they first arrived, though the family’s finances remain a worry. He fears that he became a New York cabdriver a generation too late; that the taxi industry was collapsing even before the pandemic; that he and his wife may never afford a house.

386  PART III    Crises and Ways Forward Now Shamsul shuffles to the bathroom in loose pajamas and flip-flops, shielding his eyes against the light. Do you think I have it? Mahdia, petite and practical, her thick black hair kept at shoulder’s length, usually handles the family’s paperwork, a familiar job for a first child of immigrants. She will be the one to decide what to do. Should she hold off on sending him to Elmhurst Hospital, rumored to be overrun? Or should she get him there while she can? She envisions herself frantically dialing 911 some night, only to find that all the ambulances have already been dispatched. Another squalling ambulance hurries down their block, another sick person being taken away. From her window she has seen the used rubber gloves left by paramedics on the street. Wednesday, March 25 ‘If I could just say to every American: We’ll get through this.’ Jack Wongserat demands to be handed a takeout container to fill an order. He becomes annoyed when one is not made available, then sits down to dial the telephone. But there are no takeout containers. There is no telephone. Nor is he back  working at a Thai restaurant in Manhattan on this cool and cloudy  morning. Jack is in his Woodside apartment, in the throes of a delusion. By tonight, much of the country will be disabused of any illusions about the virus, in part because of Jack. His partner, Joe, settles him into a plush chair in their bedroom, then eases him onto the bed, hoping that he will sleep. But soon Jack is gasping for air. As Joe hurriedly turns him on his side, they both crash to the floor. Joe dials 911 and tries to follow the dispatcher’s instructions for administering CPR. The ambulance, of course, seems to take forever. The paramedics hurl the tan chair onto the bed to create room, then take Jack by stretcher down to the courtyard. As five medics wheel him to the ambulance, his stomach rises and falls in frantic measure to his search for breath. Oh my dear, says a neighbor watching from her window. Oh no, oh my Lord, please bless him. Racing to Elmhurst Hospital on foot, Joe finds Jack intubated and unconscious on a bed in the controlled frenzy of the overcrowded emergency department. Beds are wheeled past, including one bearing a patient who appears to be dead. A drawn curtain in a corner provides minimal privacy for two men who have shared an Alabama-Thailand bond for 15 years. On the faint chance that Jack can hear, Joe talks. Everything is going to be OK. You’re at peace.

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A doctor explains that a sustained loss of oxygen has caused significant and permanent brain damage. He excuses himself to allow Joe time to decide whether everything or nothing should be done to keep Jack alive. For Joe, the only option is the one Jack would want. He accepts and signs the Do Not Resuscitate form. Sitting at the bedside of his life partner, Joe loses all sense of time. At one point Jack’s heartbeat becomes erratic, but a physician who rushes over is advised by a colleague not to assist: The patient is a D.N.R. Jack’s heart stops. Two social workers appear by Joe’s side to provide comfort and a list of funeral homes. One recommends that he make arrangements immediately, given the sudden demand. Jack Wongserat is one of 13 people to die at Elmhurst Hospital in the span of 24 hours. The hospital code for emergency intervention—“Team 700”—resounds over the loudspeaker, while a recently delivered refrigerated truck hums outside, prepared to receive. The crush of patients is so great that emergency doctors and nurses are no longer donning fresh N95 masks every time they approach a new patient. It would take too long and burn through too many. An Elmhurst Hospital doctor’s plea for help, conveyed in a video published by The New York Times, amplifies the increasingly grim situation. The doctor, Colleen Smith, says the emergency department is seeing 400 patients a day— nearly twice the normal complement—while supplies dwindle and crowds wait for medical assessments. “This is bad. People are dying,” Dr. Smith says in the video. “We don’t have the tools that we need in the emergency department and in the hospital to take care of them.” By nightfall, the borough of Queens—and, specifically, Elmhurst Hospital—will become known as the epicenter of the pandemic in New York, if not the United States. For many Americans, the coronavirus will move from abstract threat to real-life horror. Epicenter. Over and over, the word will be repeated by the president and the governor, by newspapers and broadcasters. City officials will soon release data showing that these neighborhoods, interlocking ZIP codes containing the world, top the list of the worst-hit parts of New York. But right now there is just Joe Farris alone, walking home through the gray afternoon. He heads down 41st Avenue, past a Spanish pharmacy, a Chinese church, and the old Lutheran church where people of Sherpa heritage are assembling Covid care packages. He is in shock, his mind a jumble of every thought and no thought. All he knows for certain is that a pandemic in Queens has claimed his love. Friday, March 27 ‘We remain the epicenter of the Covid-19 crisis in the United States of America.’

388  PART III    Crises and Ways Forward The day of 13 deaths at Elmhurst Hospital was difficult, horrible, tragic. But for Dr. Laura Iavicoli, an associate director of its emergency department, that was not the worst day. The worst is two days later—today. She is a self-described proud Philly girl whose shoulder-length black hair offsets her white lab coat. This is who and how she has wanted to be since elementary school, after her best friend was hit by a car and brain-injured, then saved by emergency physicians. She is also highly motivated, someone who decompresses by working toward a black belt in mixed martial arts; whose idea of relaxing is to drink Colombian coffee, extra light, while working on her laptop in a cafe. Relaxation is now a foreign concept. Since the outbreak of the coronavirus, she leaves her family’s Upper West Side apartment early, returns late and avoids talking about her day. No need to upset her three daughters, who are 12, 10 and 9. This morning, Dr. Iavicoli straps on her black helmet and mounts her bicycle, a red and black Fuji Oval bought for $250 a week ago by her husband. It is a replacement for the stress-reducing jogs she no longer has time for. She cycles through Central Park, over the 59th Street Bridge and into Queens, bound for her now-famous workplace. Her pride in Elmhurst Hospital remains strong, but she is witnessing the institution being tested to its limits. One of her colleagues calls the situation apocalyptic; another will liken it to Dante’s “Inferno.” Late in the afternoon, she hurries to join Dr. Kessler for another pandemicrelated conference call, but on her way she is stunned by how the Covid sick have overtaken the emergency department. In beds, behind curtains, in the hall, in the waiting room, everywhere. She can barely see the pale tile floor. But giving it all is not always enough. Before dawn this morning, a ringing cellphone disrupts sleep in the Bronx apartment of Olivia Aldama, Yimel’s sister. The caller is speaking in English, so she hands the phone to one of her teenage sons, now awake. It’s Elmhurst Hospital. Yimel’s blood pressure has dropped and her breathing has slowed, he says. If her heart stops, as it did a few days ago, should they try to revive her? Yes, yes, yes, Olivia says. Whatever they have to do. They hang up, and Olivia waits in the dark. She last saw her sister nearly two weeks ago, the day after Yimel was hospitalized. She had waited in vain for 12 hours, hoping for an update on Yimel’s condition, before finally mustering her courage and slipping into the I.C.U. late that night. The nurses didn’t even look up, which had Olivia thinking, God must have made me invisible. There was her sister, sedated in a glass-sealed room. Even with tubes curling around her face, Yimel looked dignified, her chin raised, her eyes closed beneath thin, arched eyebrows.

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The phone rings again. This time, a translation service for the hospital is calling to say that Yimel—her Chiquis—has died. Olivia cannot go back to sleep. In a few hours, she thinks, she will ask someone who speaks English to call the hospital back to make sure it is true. Later this morning, in a darkened bedroom in Corona, Rosa Lema lies awake in bedsheets damp from another feverish night. Her mind is spinning. Her brother-in-law, the tile layer, has just left for the hospital with severe symptoms. Rosa’s test results have shown not only that she has the coronavirus, but also that she is pregnant. Weak and short of breath, she does not want to move. But from her bed she hears a sound disrupting the apartment’s usual chattering hum. One of her daughters, sobbing. Rosa manages to rise and walk into the living room. Her husband, who has just lost his job in construction, is crying; he takes her in his arms. Her sister Carmen, who has just lost her job as a house cleaner, has stopped making lunch and is comforting Rosa’s 9-year-old daughter. Rosa takes in the scene, and she knows. Their brother Jorge has called with devastating news: Se nos fue la vieja. We lost our old lady. The family had heard little from Elmhurst Hospital since Vicenta was admitted and intubated a week ago. There was no warning that her condition had deteriorated. No chance to say goodbye, even by video. Soon, the six children of Vicenta Flores will struggle to find a mortician to collect her body from the hospital, which is demanding that it be removed as soon as possible. They will have to have difficult video-call discussions about cremation, which, according to the consulate, is now the only way to send the remains of people who died of Covid back to Ecuador. And they will have to decide when to tell their father, José, who remains at a local rehabilitation center, that his wife of a half-century is dead. But right now, everyone is crying over the loss of their Abuelita. Carmen moves to embrace Rosa, but her sister turns and heads back to her bed. Soon, from behind Rosa’s door, comes the sound of weeping. It is nearly 3 in the morning when Dr. Iavicoli straps on her helmet. She guides her new bicycle out of an office, down an empty hallway and out into the stilled night. With the white tent and refrigerated truck behind her, she cycles past a Mexican grocery, a couple of Thai restaurants, a Hindu temple, a Muslim cultural center, a tax service for Spanish speakers. Queens. She knows that when she reaches her apartment, her husband will have laid out the hand sanitizer and the disinfectant wipes. She will throw her clothes in the laundry and take a hot shower. She has 50 minutes before arriving at her doorstep to leave her pandemicfilled day behind. She thinks of what went well; what could have gone better, and how. She wonders when the death and sickness will end.

390  PART III    Crises and Ways Forward The doctor turns left onto Roosevelt Avenue, where the elevated subway tracks create a skeletal ceiling. She feels as if she is moving through some alternate universe. As if the great metropolis of New York were in paralytic shock. Down city thoroughfares as quiet as country roads, then onto the cantilevered 59th Street Bridge. Dr. Iavicoli can see the East River murk through the metal grates beneath her tires, then parts of Roosevelt Island, where her cherished workplace began operating nearly 200 years ago. She exits the bridge and glides as if in a dream through a silenced Manhattan. The rush of cool city air clears her mind, allows her to shed the day like a tossed lab coat. Up First Avenue. Across 66th Street. Through the darkened sanctuary of Central Park to the Upper West Side. Home. Sunday, March 29 ‘We are going to have millions of cases.’ Dawa Sherpa has been ill for more than a week. Coughing. Lethargic. No appetite. Struggling to breathe. His wife, Sita Rai, trails after him as he shambles around their Woodside apartment, wiping whatever he touches with disinfectant. But he is so weak this evening that she calls for an ambulance. He makes his way down the gray-carpeted steps, past the descending row of the family’s shoes, and is winded by the effort. Dawa is taken a half-mile to Elmhurst Hospital, which continues to develop in-the-moment protocols for what is now considered an ongoing mass-casualty event. The news last week of 13 deaths in a day has prompted an outpouring of support in donations of masks and other supplies. And, soon, patient transfers will ease the overcrowding. But the publicity has also fueled a troubling misapprehension among some local residents, based on ominous things they have seen and heard. The refrigerated truck. The wailing ambulances. The long lines. The rhythmic thump of hovering news helicopters. Word spreads that no one who enters Elmhurst Hospital comes out alive. The local rumor mill spins the 13 deaths into 15; 25; 1,000. The false information has convinced some to face Covid on their own at home, armed with little more than tea and, with any luck, Tylenol. It can be a fatal decision. But like many others, Dawa has chosen to trust the doctors at Elmhurst. He is led to a small area where others sitting in mismatched chairs draw oxygen from various devices. The hospital has no choice but to group the sick together. Some are talking in Spanish on cellphones, some cry in fear. He shares their terror. He knows that another Uber driver from Nepal, a father of three,

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recently died of the virus in this hospital. That man was a year younger than Dawa. The former monk is connected to an oxygen generator. To keep calm, he recites a prayer in his head that invokes and evokes the embodiment of the Buddha’s compassion: Sol wa deb so la ma chen re zig, Sol wa deb so yi dam chen re zig … Queens can use the prayers. Dawa sits upright in a corner of the emergency room. He sits as Sunday night blurs into Monday, and Monday into Tuesday. Now and then he stretches his legs, draping his black jacket over his padded chair to claim it. He asks the nurses who monitor his vitals if there is a bed, only to be told not yet. He feels hungry and is given a sandwich, but he is unable to eat. He gets by on juice and water and oxygen and prayer. Sol wa deb so la ma chen re zig, Sol wa deb so yi dam chen re zig … Tuesday becomes Wednesday. Finally, Dawa is led to a room on the third floor. He sheds his stale clothes for a gray hospital gown and eases into the comfort of a bed for the first time in four days. His roommate, a man with the same virus, speaks only Spanish. Still, they exchange encouragement with simple gestures. A nod. A thumbs-up. A peace sign. Wednesday, April 8 ‘Every New Yorker knows someone who has the coronavirus.’ A gray Chrysler minivan makes its daily rounds. Its driver listens to anything that distracts, from sports to hip-hop to Johnny Cash. He drinks Gatorade now instead of coffee; he has enough trouble sleeping. This is Tom Habermann, 34, manager and resident mortician of the Guida Funeral Home. Thin and exhausted, he wears jeans and a sweater instead of his normal work attire of somber black. Death is too common for any formality. He spends these days driving from hospital to hospital, collecting bodies. There is no time for embalming, or choosing floral arrangements, or assembling pallbearers. There is only the sliding of body bags into the minivan’s hold, again and again. The Guida Funeral Home, a family-owned anchor of Corona for more than a century, usually handles 100 or so deaths a year; it will nearly match that number in just eight weeks this spring. An answering service has been retained to handle the many calls from people begging for help, now that some parlors are refusing to accept virus victims or are too busy to even answer the phone.

392  PART III    Crises and Ways Forward Mr. Habermann and Eddie Guida Jr., the funeral home’s owner and his best friend from high school, do what they can. They see themselves as performing a grim but necessary duty at a time when the rituals of mourning have been upended. The last responders. But the volume is too great. Hospitals and funeral homes do not have enough room for all the bodies; crematories and cemeteries do not have enough time. A local crematory recently offered: You can come next Friday— but bring only two. Mr. Guida, 34, stocky and tattooed, has relied on his many connections. An uncle has a friend on Long Island who has provided a 54-by-8-foot refrigerated truck, and one of his cousins owns an empty lot nearby. That is where the parked truck now hums, the temperature set at 32 degrees. Soon it will hold nearly 50 bodies. Mr. Guida feels the pressure of stewardship for his family’s funeral home, which is old enough to have handled deaths during the 1918 influenza pandemic. He worries that the parlor will not be able to keep up with demand. But Mr. Habermann is the one who has to collect the bodies. He then has to set the facial features of the dead for simple headshots that allow for both positive identification and some closure for families who have been denied wakes and viewings. He drives his minivan to Elmhurst Hospital. To Flushing Hospital. To Coney Island Hospital. To Mather Hospital out on Long Island. Back to the funeral home. Then to the truck. Sometimes Mr. Habermann listens to the radio as he drives. Sometimes he thinks about the apartment renovations that he and his wife never seem able to finish. Sometimes he wonders when death will become normal again. Sometimes, at the end of the day, the professional facade cracks, and the mortician cries. — Evening approaches, the clouds part and a Covid patient at Elmhurst prepares to leave. Dawa, the Uber driver who was once a Buddhist monk, has spent the last nine nights in the hospital. As he recovered, his roommate, who always returned his thumbs-up encouragement, had declined. One morning Dawa awakened beside an empty bed. He sheds his hospital gown for his street clothes and signs the discharge papers. He considers walking, but realizes he hasn’t the strength. He takes an Uber the half-mile home. Monday, July 20 ‘We did the impossible, as New Yorkers.’ A small stage materializes in a parking lot beside El Trio restaurant in Corona. Its scarlet cloth backdrop shields an old Chevy van from view.

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Headless mannequins in gowns of black and fuchsia stand like bodyguards at an exclusive outdoor affair. A memorial celebration is being held for Yimel Alvarado, who created those gowns for her cabaret performances in the restaurant’s upstairs lounge, where she would lip-sync songs of love. Close friends, the Familia Alvarado, have adorned the stage with vivid bouquets that offset the pavement’s gray. They recite the rosary and raise drinks in toast. Many wear face masks to guard against what might linger in the hot evening air. While the coronavirus continues its indiscriminate spread across the country, here in New York it has taken an uneasy summertime pause, allowing for an approximation of normal life. Allowing Yimel’s family and friends to gather in her honor, albeit outdoors. But the great metropolis remains shaken by the virus’s lethal supremacy; by tonight, health officials will have counted 18,787 confirmed deaths. And no corner of New York has felt its wrath more than the interlocking Queens neighborhoods of Corona, East Elmhurst, Elmhurst, Jackson Heights and Woodside. Tens of thousands are out of work. People stand in long food pantry lines while trying to maintain a safe distance. Many who are undocumented, and therefore ineligible for benefits, have turned to hawking wares from the sidewalks: tacos, pork rinds, flavored ices, face masks. Most everyone knows someone who has died. In this eight-square-mile patch of Queens, about 1,400 people will have died from the coronavirus by the end of July. In just one elementary school in Elmhurst, nearly 90 students have already lost a parent or guardian. Absence is everywhere. In a crowded apartment in Corona, the Lema family mourns not one death, but two. Days after a funeral service on Staten Island for Vicenta, the family’s matriarch, her husband, José, died of the virus before being told of his wife’s death. Two small urns containing their ashes sit on a chipped dresser in the bedroom they shared, with a statue of theVirgin Mary between them. Their pregnant daughter Rosa plans to take the urns back to Ecuador. She is waiting for the necessary paperwork—and the birth of her son. In Woodside, Joe Farris continues to adjust to life without his partner, Jack Wongserat. For a few weeks he slept on the living room couch, unable to enter their bedroom, much less remove the chair that medics had tossed on the bed while tending to Jack. Jack’s many pairs of sneakers still fill the shoe rack near the front door, and the pieces of china for the restaurant he never opened sit in a glass case. The Buddha-figurine gold necklace that Jack wore the day he died rests in a place of honor.

394  PART III    Crises and Ways Forward But Joe is making progress. He plays Buddhist meditation music, practices forms of stress reduction and sleeps in the bed he no longer shares. Many recovered. Some experienced minor symptoms. Some endured what seemed like an especially bad flu. Some came so close to dying that they will feel the breath knocked out of them for months. After being discharged from Elmhurst Hospital, Dawa Sherpa spent weeks recuperating. Now, while his wife works, he cares for their three sons—the youngest cartwheels through the apartment—and volunteers at the United Sherpa Association, preparing care packages for those still in need. He has not returned to driving for Uber. Shamsul Chowdhury, the bank officer from Bangladesh who became a taxi driver in Queens, has also recovered, but his family has not gone unscathed. Three relatives died, and every other member of his household fell ill: his wife; their daughter, Mahdia; and two sons. So many of his taxi-driving colleagues were lost to the virus that there is talk of a memorial. But Shamsul, too, has given up driving for hire; soon he will have a new job as a mail handler for the United States Postal Service. Mahdia is now working as an unpaid intern for a state senator’s office— her tasks include helping constituents apply for unemployment insurance— and will return to Cornell in the fall. The virus has brought about other changes. Elmhurst Hospital has held virtual meetings to reassure residents and dispel misconceptions. It has improved ways of providing updates on patients’ conditions, and helped to establish the clinical protocols for treating Covid, forged in the hellish days of March. Not that those days are forgotten. Here and there are modest tributes: a photo of a well-liked mechanic outside a bicycle-repair shop; a black ribbon in a bakery window; a votive candle’s quivering flame. But as the city anticipates a resurgence of the virus, one that will approach frightening levels by late fall, the worry is whether the warnings have been heeded. Will the lesson—that overcrowding helped make Queens an epicenter of the worst pandemic in a century—have been learned? Up and down Roosevelt Avenue, fliers taped to the elevated subway columns advertise rooms newly available in basements, in subdivided apartments, in dwellings within dwellings. They flutter in the city breeze. Outside El Trio on this hot and humid July evening, the rosaries have been said, a mariachi band has performed, and a black box containing Yimel’s ashes has been placed on the red-cloth stage. Her younger sister Olivia, the last family member to see her alive, wears a T-shirt depicting Yimel as an angel in a fabulous red gown. Olivia has lost her job at the dry cleaners; her arms are now tanned from selling bottled water in a park.

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She calls her mother, Concepción Alvarado, in Mexico. Soon the grayhaired woman appears on the cellphone screen, beside the altar she has set up in Yimel’s honor outside a cinder-block house. There, on a plate, sits her daughter’s favorite pastry. The mother cries, and wipes her tears with a rag. As the sky-blue evening gives in to the cerulean night, grief cedes ground. Members of the Familia Alvarado disappear, only to return in sequined gowns and caftans. Elevated by their platform shoes, they vamp and sing of love and defiance. Shots of tequila are raised up and knocked back, as people erupt in shouts of Que viva Yimel! The celebration of life in a drab parking lot in Queens continues well past midnight, into the hope and uncertainty of another day.

22 Structurally Vulnerable Neighborhood Environments and Racial/Ethnic COVID-19 Inequities Rachel L. Berkowitz, Xing Gao, Eli K. Michaels and Mahasin S. Mujahid† The experience of the novel coronavirus is not shared equally across places. In  their working paper examining 30,318 COVID-19 deaths from 3,144 United States (U.S.) counties, Chen and Krieger found higher COVID-19 county death rates (cumulative deaths as of April 16, 2020 per 100,000 population) in the most disadvantaged counties (% of persons living in poverty, % of crowded households, and concentration of extreme racial and socioeconomic segregation) and counties with the largest populations of people of color (% of population that is not white, Non-Hispanic) (2020). These findings suggest that the burden of COVID-19 morbidity and mortality may be hardest felt in disadvantaged and racially segregated places in the U.S., places disproportionately populated by people of color (Bailey et al., 2017). Indeed, † ‘Structurally vulnerable neighbourhood environments and racial/ethnic COVID-19 inequities’, Rachel L. Berkowitz, Xing Gao, Eli K. Michaels and Mahasin S. Mujahid, Cities & Health, 5.sup1, pp. S59-S62, 2021, Taylor & Francis, reprinted by permission of the publisher (Taylor & Francis Ltd, http://www.tandfonline.com).

396  PART III    Crises and Ways Forward data show that Black, Latinx, and American Indian/Alaskan Native individuals are becoming sicker and dying more often from COVID-19 than white individuals (Braithwaite & Warren, 2020). Similar racial/ethnic inequities in COVID-19 mortality have been observed in other countries as well, including Brazil and the United Kingdom (Phillips, 2020). Multiple intersecting racist systems have been implicated in the racial/ethnic inequities in COVID-19 outcomes in the U.S. (e.g. the overrepresentation of racially minoritized groups in the “essential” workforce, inequitable incarceration rates, and racism in healthcare (Bailey et al., 2017; Braithwaite & Warren, 2020)). This commentary specifically examines how structurally vulnerable neighborhoods before and during the pandemic impact racial/ethnic inequities in exposure to SARS-COV-2 and morbidity and mortality from COVID-19 in the U.S.. We conclude by considering opportunities for research and intervention to understand and prevent such inequities in the U.S. and around the world.

Structural Racism and Neighborhoods: Unequal Investment and Access Structural racism “…refers to the totality of ways in which societies foster racial discrimination, through mutually reinforcing inequitable systems (in housing, education, employment, earnings, benefits, credit, media, health care, criminal justice, and so on) that in turn reinforce discriminatory beliefs, values, and distribution of resources…” (Bailey et al, 2017, p. 1454). One manifestation of structural racism in the U.S. is racial residential segregation, or “the physical separation of the races in residential contexts…” implemented and upheld by policies, economic institutions, the judicial system, and local home owners’ associations and real estate organizations in the early 20th century (Williams & Collins, 2001, p. 405). As a result, Black Americans were subject to severe limitations on where they could live and what investments could be made in their neighborhoods. Though de jure racial segregation through explicit racial discrimination in the sale or rental of housing was outlawed by the 1968 Civil Rights Acts, the reality of racial segregation persists for people of color. Independent of individual socioeconomic status, people of color are still more likely to live in neighborhoods with fewer resources, less investment, and greater likelihood of exposure to harmful pollutants and stressful circumstances compared to non-Hispanic white people (Bailey at al., 2017; Williams & Collins, 2001. We refer to these neighborhoods as structurally vulnerable, recognizing the non-random and non-voluntary ways in which (1) neighborhoods have been subjected to generations of disinvestment, (2) discriminatory policies and uneven economic development have disproportionately pushed people of color toward residence in such neighborhoods, (3) neighborhoods with large populations of people of color continue to be targets of neglect, and (4) people of color are at risk of being displaced when neighborhood investment begins.

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Structurally Vulnerable Neighborhoods Before COVID-19 Research has shown that living in a structurally vulnerable neighborhood is associated with increased risk for adverse health behaviors and chronic conditions (e.g. cardiovascular disease, Type 2 diabetes, and obesity) (Diez Roux & Mair, 2010). Living in a neighborhood with high levels of air pollution, insufficient food outlets, few parks and recreational spaces, or community safety concerns and over-policing may limit residents’ opportunities for physical activity and healthy food choices (Diez Roux & Mair, 2010). This may in turn increase risks for chronic conditions associated with diet and exercise. These same conditions make deprived neighborhood environments potential sources of chronic stress over the life course. For example, economically deprived neighborhoods and those with large communities of color are more likely to experience police killings (Feldman et al., 2019), and African Americans, American Indians/Alaskan Natives, and Latino men have a higher lifetime risk of being killed by police compared to non-Hispanic whites (Edwards et al., 2019). As a result, the threats of over-policing and police violence are powerful potential chronic stressors (DeVylder et al., 2018). Living in a stressful environment may contribute to allostatic load (the dysregulation of multiple physiologic systems, including the cardiovascular and inflammatory systems) which in turn increases the risk of multiple chronic conditions (Diez Roux & Mair, 2010; Ribeiro et al., 2018). That people of color have higher rates of chronic disease in the U.S. is unsurprising when one recognizes that these communities are also more likely to live in structurally vulnerable neighborhoods (Bailey et al., 2017; Braithwaite & Warren, 2020). Given what is known about increased risk of COVID-19 morbidity and mortality among those with underlying chronic conditions, it is understandable that residents of these neighborhoods – disproportionately people of color – may be more vulnerable. Rather than emphasizing the chronic health conditions themselves, we must recognize the culpability of these structural preexisting conditions.

Changes to Structurally Vulnerable Neighborhoods in Response to COVID-19 Globally, there is a push to implement structural, social, and economic placebased modifications to slow the transmission of SARS-COV-2. However, the impact and effectiveness of these policies may be inequitably distributed between structurally privileged and structurally vulnerable communities. Shelter-in-place orders may increase risk of exposure among people living in crowded housing where social distancing is not possible and at least one

398  PART III    Crises and Ways Forward individual must venture out to work. Living in a neighborhood with limited access to healthcare and food prior to the pandemic may be even more harmful now, with contracted public transportation systems and shelterin-place discouraging travel beyond immediate surroundings. Over-policing of communities of color to enforce shelter-in-place causes additional fear and anxiety (Burns, 2020). And though important for minimizing exposure to SARS-COV-2, the closing of churches, community centers, and parks, along with the discouragement of social gatherings, may also increase risk of COVID-19 morbidity and mortality for residents of structurally vulnerable neighborhoods. Studies have found that dimensions of a neighborhood’s social environment (e.g. levels of social connectedness, social cohesion, social support, and social interactions) are protective against depression, poor self-reported health, obesity, and physical inactivity (Perez et al., 2019). By disrupting aspects of the social environment that had previously been protective for health, shelter-in-place may increase residents’ vulnerabilities to COVID-19. Though these changes to neighborhoods and their consequences for health and wellbeing are currently unfolding, recognizing the potential impacts on racial/ethnic inequities related to COVID-19 can influence how resources are distributed now to prevent further damage (Chen & Krieger, 2020).

Moving Forward The consequences of the pandemic reach far beyond COVID-19 morbidity and mortality. The effects of social and economic insecurity and the trauma of massive loss of life will continue to impact societies around the world for generations. Just as we are seeing during the pandemic, residents of color in structurally vulnerable neighborhoods are at risk of bearing the brunt of these long-term consequences if nothing is done. The U.S. is not alone in this reality. Research from Brazil finds that Black and Brown individuals were more likely that White individual to live in highly economically segregated neighborhoods, and that residents of highly segregated neighborhoods had higher odds of hypertension and diabetes (Barber et al., 2018). Wherever structural racism shapes where people live and the exposures characterizing those places, health inequities will persist. Research to understand the causes of racial/ethnic inequities in COVID-19 outcomes must incorporate the factors accounting for the unique historical and contemporary realities of racism in different societies. In addition, this pandemic is a global call to action for neighborhood transformation efforts to prioritize addressing health inequities. At the local level, “place-based initiatives” can improve neighborhood quality before and during a pandemic. Place-based initiatives are neighborhood development efforts that span multiple sectors (e.g. housing, education, city planning, public health), prioritize the unique circumstances of a small

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geographic area, and center the values and goals of residents (Bailey et al., 2017). One example is the Purpose Built Communities model, based on the successful revitalization of the East Lake neighborhood in Atlanta, GA, which includes the creation of mixed-income housing, support for cradleto-college education, and investment in community wellness resources, all in partnership with community residents. This model has supported effective place-based community development in over 20 neighborhoods around the U.S.. Central to these efforts is a consideration of the complexities of local history, culture, and needs as they intersect with neighborhood improvements and the deliberate commitment to ensuring that development ultimately benefits neighborhood residents and alleviates structural harms. At the city, state, and national levels, incorporating a “Health in All Policies”(HiAP) strategy across governmental agencies can support the implementation of policies to address structural vulnerabilities within neighborhoods (Corburn et al., 2014). HiAP calls for multisectoral, multiagency collaboration in communities to “address the root causes of health inequities by encouraging inter-sectoral action for health promotion” (2014, p. 624). The goal of HiAP is to “[move] beyond ad hoc or short-term health promotion programs…[in order to integrate] health and health equity into newly established processes of governmental decision making” (2014, p. 625). The World Health Organization provides a framework for countries to implement a HiAP strategy (WHO, 2014). One example in the city of Richmond, California, U.S., involved collaboration with residents to develop an Urban Health Equity in All Policies strategy that became law in 2014 (Corburn et al., 2014). The strategy transformed Richmond’s governance approach into one that “prioritize[s] health equity within almost all its planning, fiscal, and service decisions” (Corburn et al., 2014, p.632). Structural racism operating across sectors created structurally vulnerable neighborhoods, and so the responsibility to overturn structural racism must be similarly distributed. COVID-19 is not an anomaly. It is but the latest disease to travel through neighborhoods along paths of inequity created by structural racism. The road forward is not yet written, yet the charge is clear. We must build neighborhoods that can prevent and eliminate racial/ethnic health inequities and ensure that all people can truly thrive.

Acknowledgements We would like to acknowledge the inspiration provided by the following scholars through public presentations about structural racism and COVID-19 at the University of California, Berkeley: Dr. Amani Allen, Dr. Jason Corburn, Dr. Denise Herd, Dr. Nancy Krieger, Dr. Cassie Marshall, Dr. Corinne Riddell, Dr. Rachel Morello-Frosch, and Dr. Osagie Obasogie. We would also like to thank Elleni Hailu, MPH, for her thought partnership.

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Funding Details This work was supported by the following funding sources: • The Health Equity and Implementation Science Postdoctoral Research Fellowship; University of California, Berkeley School of Public Health and the Sutter Health Center for Health Systems Research • NIH-NHLBI under Grant 1F31HL151284–01A1

References Bailey ZD, Krieger N, Agénor M, Graves J, Linos N, & Bassett MT (2017). Structural racism and health inequities in the USA: Evidence and interventions. The Lancet, 389(10077), 1453–1463. 10.1016/S0140-6736(17)30569-X Barber S, Diez Roux AV, Cardoso L, Santos S, Toste V, James S, Barreto S, Schmidt M, Giatti L, & Chor D (2018). At the intersection of place, race, and health in Brazil: Residential segregation and cardio-metabolic risk factors in the Brazilian Longitudinal Study of Adult Health (ELSA-Brasil). Social Science & Medicine, 199, 67–76. 10.1016/j.socscimed.2017.05.047 Braithwaite R, & Warren R (2020). The African American Petri Dish. Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved, Ahead of Print, Volume 31(2), 12. Burns K (2020, May 8). Social distancing arrests target people of color. Vox. https:// www.vox.com/identities/2020/5/8/21252091/social-distancing-arrests-target-peopleof-color Chen JT, & Krieger N (2020). Revealing the unequal burden of COVID-19 by income, race/ethnicity, and household crowding: US county vs ZIP code analyses. Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies Working Paper Series, 19(1). https:// tinyurl.com/y7v72446 Corburn J, Curl S, Arredondo G, & Malagon J (2014). Health in All Urban Policy: City Services through the Prism of Health. Journal of Urban Health, 91(4), 623–636. 10.1007/s11524-014-9886-3 DeVylder JE, Jun H-J, Fedina L, Coleman D, Anglin D, Cogburn C, Link B, & Barth RP (2018). Association of Exposure to Police Violence With Prevalence of Mental Health Symptoms Among Urban Residents in the United States. JAMA Network Open, 1(7), e184945. 10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2018.4945 Diez Roux AV, & Mair C (2010). Neighborhoods and health. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1186(1), 125–145. 10.1111/j.1749-6632.2009.05333.x Edwards F, Lee H, & Esposito M (2019). Risk of being killed by police use of force in the United States by age, race–ethnicity, and sex. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 116(34), 16793–16798. 10.1073/pnas.1821204116 Feldman JM, Gruskin S, Coull BA, & Krieger N (2019). Police-Related Deaths and Neighborhood Economic and Racial/Ethnic Polarization, United States, 2015–2016. American Journal of Public Health, 109(3), 458–464. 10.2105/AJPH.2018.304851 Pérez E, Braën C, Boyer G, Mercille G, Rehany É, Deslauriers V, Bilodeau A, & Potvin L (2019). Neighbourhood community life and health: A systematic review of reviews. Health & Place, 102238. 10.1016/j.healthplace.2019.102238

Chapter 7   The Year 2020 and Its Aftermath   401 Phillips D (2020, June 9). “Enormous disparities”: Coronavirus death rates expose Brazil’s deep racial inequalities. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/ world/2020/jun/09/enormous-disparities-coronavirus-death-rates-expose-­brazilsdeep-racial-inequalities Ribeiro A, Amaro J, Lisi C, & Fraga S (2018). Neighborhood Socioeconomic Deprivation and Allostatic Load: A Scoping Review. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 15(6), 1092. 10.3390/ijerph15061092 WHO. (2014). Health in All Policies (HiAP) Framework for Country Action. World Health Organization. http://www.who.int/cardiovascular_diseases/ 140120HPRHiAPFramework.pdf Williams DR, & Collins C (2001). Racial residential segregation: A fundamental cause of racial disparities in health. Public Health Reports, 116(5), 404–416.

23 COVID-19 Cases in New York City, a Neighborhood-Level Analysis The Stoop, NYU Furman Center Blog‡ As of April 8th, New York City had over 80,000 cases of novel coronavirus. These cases are not evenly distributed across the city, nor is mortality from the disease. Neighborhoods with higher rates of confirmed COVID-19 cases have lower median incomes, higher shares of residents who are Black or Hispanic, and higher shares of residents under the age of 18 relative to less affected neighborhoods. Residents of these neighborhoods are less likely to be able to work from home, disproportionately rely on public transit during the crisis, and are less likely to have internet access. Finally, we find that areas with higher numbers of confirmed COVID-19 cases have lower population density, yet they do have higher rates of overcrowding at the household level. Further, we see large disparities in mortality rates from COVID-19 across the five boroughs. To date, the Bronx has seen the highest rate of deaths per capita from the virus. This may result from higher rates of underlying health conditions that increase the risk of severe cases, or from more limited access to health care. Citywide data confirm that mortality rates due to COVID-19 are highest among Hispanic, Black, and non-Hispanic/Latino Other populations.

‡ The Stoop, NYU Furman Center Blog, April 10th 2020 https://furmancenter.org/thestoop/ entry/covid-19-cases-in-new-york-city-a-neighborhood-level-analysis

402  PART III    Crises and Ways Forward To examine disparities in incidence across neighborhoods, we divide the city’s ZIP Codes (the lowest level geography of publicly available data) into quintiles based on the number of cases per 1,000 people. The top 20 percent of ZIP Codes form the highest quintile, the next 20 percent form the 4th quintile, and so on. We then review racial composition and key indicators by quintile. We caution that the number of positive cases is clearly an undercount: testing for the coronavirus has been limited, and the prevalence of testing likely varies across different areas, meaning that the undercount may be higher in some neighborhoods than others. Areas with higher rates of COVID-19 have higher Black and Hispanic population shares on average, and lower Asian and white shares. COVID-19 appears to have had a disparate impact on communities of color. The share of the population that is Black and Hispanic is 13.6 and 12.5 percentage points higher, respectively, in the top quintile than in the bottom quintile. Meanwhile, the share of residents who are white falls with the rate of positive cases. These differences align with racial differences in teleworking nationally.

FIGURE 1  New York City Neighborhoods and Positive Case Quintiles, April 7, 2020 (number of cases per 1,000 people) Source: Furman Center.

Chapter 7   The Year 2020 and Its Aftermath   403

TABLE 1 Neighborhood Indicators by COVID-19 Positive Case Quintiles Lowest

Cases per 1,000 People

2nd

3rd

2.32 - 5.53 5.53 - 6.95 6.95 - 8.66

4th

Highest

8.66 - 10.7

10.7 - 19.5

Racial Composition Share Asian

20.2% (+/-0.3%)

13.6% (+/-0.3%)

9.8% (+/-0.2%)

11.3% (+/-0.3%)

15.0% (+/-0.3%)

Share Black

13.0% (+/-0.3%)

18.0% (+/-0.3%)

26.3% (+/-0.3%)

24.8% (+/-0.3%)

26.6% (+/-0.4%)

Share Hispanic

18.0% (+/-0.3%)

25.2% (+/-0.4%)

38.1% (+/-0.4%)

31.8% (+/-0.4%)

30.5% (+/-0.5%)

Share White

45.9% (+/-0.3%)

40.5% (+/-0.4%)

22.8% (+/-0.2%)

28.7% (+/-0.3%)

25.1% (+/-0.3%)

19.1% (+/-0.4%)

22.4% (+/-0.4%)

19.6% (+/-0.4%)

17.3% (+/-0.4%)

Economic Indicators Poverty Rate

15.6% (+/-0.4%)

Median Income

$80,566.45 $68,404.12 $49,372.77 $58,409.36 $57,498.00

Share College Educated

54.6% (+/-0.4%)

48.8% (+/-0.5%)

26.5% (+/-0.3%)

30.3% (+/-0.3%)

27.3% (+/-0.3%)

14.4% (+/-0.3%)

15.2% (+/-0.3%)

19.9% (+/-0.3%)

17.9% (+/-0.3%)

19.0% (+/-0.4%)

10.5% (+/-0.3%)

11.6% (+/-0.3%)

14.6% (+/-0.3%)

12.6% (+/-0.3%)

13.7% (+/-0.4%)

-89.2%

-80.1%

-79.9%

-82.9%

Connection Indicators Share with No Internet Access Share with No Computing Device

Public Transit Use Average Change -89.9% Weekday Ridership Density Indicators Share Renters

70.5% (+/-0.4%)

73.5% (+/-0.4%)

70.6% (+/-0.3%)

60.8% (+/-0.3%)

59.4% (+/-0.4%)

Share Renters Overcrowded

7.3% (+/-0.3%)

8.9% (+/-0.3%)

12.5% (+/-0.4%)

13.0% (+/-0.4%)

15.2% (+/-0.5%)

Population 48,067 Density (people/ sq mi)

47,845

29,050

20,144

25,082

Share Housing in 10+ Unit Buildings

71.0% (+/-0.6%)

47.7% (+/-0.5%)

44.9% (+/-0.5%)

41.7% (+/-0.6%)

63.7% (+/-0.6%)

(Continued)

404  PART III    Crises and Ways Forward TABLE 1 (Continued) Lowest

2nd

3rd

4th

Highest

Other Demographic Indicators Share Foreign Born

32.4% (+/-0.3%)

33.1% (+/-0.4%)

41.1% (+/-0.3%)

36.7% (+/-0.3%)

41.0% (+/-0.4%)

Share Under 18

16.3% (+/-0.2%)

18.2% (+/-0.3%)

22.6% (+/-0.2%)

23.7% (+/-0.2%)

23.2% (+/-0.3%)

Share Over 65

15.1% (+/-0.2%)

14.7% (+/-0.2%)

13.2% (+/-0.2%)

12.8% (+/-0.2%)

14.8% (+/-0.2%)

There are higher rates of confirmed COVID-19 cases in areas where less of the population is able to work from home. People with college degrees are more likely to be able to work remotely, and the data show that the share of adults with college degrees decreases as the prevalence of coronavirus cases increases. The difference between the lowest and highest quintile is considerable (54.6% versus 27.3%). Households in the lowest quintile are also more likely to have access to the internet than households in ZIP Codes with higher rates of the coronavirus. While MTA Subway ridership dropped dramatically across the city, areas with higher rates of COVID-19 saw a smaller decline. For workers unable to stay home, reliance on public transit to get to and from work may also affect neighborhood vulnerability to coronavirus transmission. Weekday public transit use dropped by 89.9 percent on average for the ZIP Codes in the lowest quintile; the highest quintile saw a drop of 82.9 percent. COVID-19 is more prevalent in areas where more people reside in crowded units. Living in close quarters may compound risk of exposure. This risk would be even greater for households with non-remote workers, as those workers are more likely to become infected by the virus. The ZIP Codes in the highest and lowest quintiles of per capita infections have notably different shares of overcrowded renters – defined as the share of renter households with more than 1 person per room – at 15.2 percent and 7.3 percent, respectively. Overall population density is not associated with higher rates of COVID-19 cases. While ZIP Codes with higher rates of cases see higher rates of overcrowding within the household, the opposite is true of measures of neighborhood level density. ZIP Codes with a higher density and a larger share of housing in large buildings (with 10 or more units) have some of the lowest rates of cases per 1,000 people.

Chapter 7   The Year 2020 and Its Aftermath   405

ZIP Codes with a higher share of population under the age of 18 also have more positive cases. Recent research indicates that children may be at risk of transmitting COVID-19 in part because they are less likely to exhibit symptoms. The highest quintile indeed has a higher share of residents under the age of 18, compared to the lowest quintile (23.2% and 16.3%, respectively). However, it remains unclear whether children are accelerating transmission or whether these differences are driven by the fact that households with young children have lower incomes on average. While data on mortality due to COVID-19 is unavailable at the ZIP Code level, at the Borough level, the Bronx has the highest rate of deaths due to the virus. A lack of detailed data on deaths due COVID-19 prevents us from looking at mortality rates at the neighborhood level. But we see substantial disparities across boroughs. In the Bronx, the rate of COVID-19 related deaths was 0.71, followed by 0.60 in Queens. While the Bronx has a lower share of people over 65 years old compared to other Boroughs, its poverty rate is much higher than the rest of the City, at 27.3 percent. TABLE 2 COVID-19 Deaths and Health and Poverty Indicators by Borough Bronx

Brooklyn

Manhattan

Queens

COVID-19 Deaths (as of 4/8/2020)

1,001

1,185

5,000

1,344

229

COVID-19 Deaths per 1000 people

0.71

0.46

0.31

0.60

0.48

% of population over 65

12.8

13.9

16.5

15.7

16.2

Poverty rate

27.3

18.9

15.6

11.6

11.7

8.9

8.0

6.2

10.2

4.9

% without health insurance (under 65 years) % with diabetes

Staten Island

16.0

11.7

8.5

10.5

9.7

Asthma emergency department visit rate per 10,000

242.9

123.6

133.6

74.0

66.2

% with hypertension

32.3

31.2

21.2

32.7

31.0

Source: New York City Department of Health, US Census Bureau, New York State Department of Health.

406  PART III    Crises and Ways Forward The Bronx leads the city in terms of the prevalence of diabetes and asthma, two underlying conditions that put patients at higher risk of a more severe case of COVID-19. Underlying health conditions may contribute to the difference in mortality rates due to COVID-19. Bronx residents have higher rates of some of the underlying health conditions that place people at greater risk of severe coronavirus cases. Among the five boroughs, the Bronx has by far the highest rates of diabetes and asthma emergency department visits (16% and 242.9 per 10,000 people, respectively). The Bronx was recently ranked last among the state’s counties in terms of health outcomes, as well as health factors including social, economic, and environmental factors and clinical care. COVID-19 mortality rates are higher among the city’s Hispanic, Black, and non-Hispanic/Latino: Other populations. TABLE 3 NYC COVID-19 Deaths by Race and Ethnicity (as of April 6, 2020) Race/ Ethnicity

All Hispanic

NonHispanic/ Latino: Black, African American

NonHispanic/ Latino: White

NonHispanic/ Latino: Asian

NonHispanic/ Latino: Other

Total Unknown Race/ Ethnicity

Number of Deaths

521

428

424

112

70

917

% of Total with Known Race/ Ethnicity

33.5

27.5

27.3

7.2

4.5

*

Population 2,449,450 1,849,077 2,694,258 1,231,790

174,173

*

(2018 estimate) Crude Death Rate Per 100,000 Population

21.3

23.1

15.7

9.1

40.2

*

AgeAdjusted Death Rate Per 100,000 Population

22.8

19.8

10.2

8.4

59.5

*

Source: New York City Department of Health

Chapter 7   The Year 2020 and Its Aftermath   407

The age-adjusted COVID-19 death rate is particularly high among the non-Hispanic/Latino: Other population at 59.5 per 100,000 people. The mortality rate among New York City’s Hispanic and Black population is also comparatively high, reaching 22.8 and 19.8, respectively. White and Asian populations have the lowest death rates due to COVID-19 (10.2 and 8.4, respectively). It should be noted that data on race and ethnicity is only complete for 63 percent of deaths; rates based on incomplete data may not be representative of the true distribution of deaths in New York City.

24 Where Do Black Lives Matter? Race, Stigma, and Place in Milwaukee, Wisconsin Jenna M. Loyd and Anne Bonds§

Introduction The Black Lives Matter movement marks a conjunctural moment in the United States, a marked crisis in the legitimation of policing of Black communities in cities across the United States (Gilmore & Gilmore, 2016; K.-Y. Taylor, 2016). In Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the murder of Dontre Hamilton by a Milwaukee Police Department (MPD) officer in 2014 sparked concerted mobilizations against what was then the most recent police killing of a city resident. Two years later, with political and economic conditions in the city largely unchanged, uprisings ensued in Milwaukee’s Sherman Park neighborhood over three days in August 2016. These were in response to the killing of Sylville Smith by a different MPD officer. Like mobilizations in Ferguson and Baltimore, the uprising articulated a sharp critique of urban strategies of policing and prompted a larger dialogue about race, crime, policing, and inequality in the city. The ongoing debate over meaningful police reform and community safety is shaped by prevailing racialized discourses about the relationships among violence, place, and race. Even as activists were mobilizing in the name of Dontre Hamilton and other victims of police violence, local radio and newspapers ran a series of reports on Black men in prison prompted § Jenna M. Loyd and Anne Bonds, ‘Where do Black lives matter? Race, stigma, and place in Milwaukee, Wisconsin’. Sociological Review, 66.4, pp. 898-918, copyright © 2018 by Jenna M. Loyd and Anne Bonds. https://doi.org/10.1177/0038026118778175 Reprinted by Permission of SAGE Publications

408  PART III    Crises and Ways Forward by a study that concluded that Wisconsin has the highest rate of Black male incarceration in the nation (Pawasarat & Quinn, 2013). In popular discourse, this superlative figure about Black male incarceration circulates alongside reports that consistently rank Milwaukee as the most racially segregated city (Denvir, 2011; Florida, 2014), the second poorest city (Kennedy, 2015), the worst city in America for Black Americans (Miller, 2015; Mock, 2015), and Wisconsin as the worst place to raise Black children in the country (Annie E. Casey Foundation, 2014). A striking portion of the state’s formerly incarcerated people live in just one zip code within the city – 53206 – located in the predominantly Black and heavily policed Northside of Milwaukee (Pawasarat, 2009, p. 13). Within popular discourse, 53206 has come to contain symbolically the problems of Wisconsin (and nation more broadly)  – from violence to poverty to ‘failing’ public services. The power of this discourse has led to efforts to challenge the ‘stigma attached to the ZIP code …that it’s a lost cause’ (Potter, 2016). In this article we argue that the zipcode 53206 has become a spatial shorthand for talking about race, violence, and poverty without talking about structural racism, capitalism, or the institutions of violence that sustain racial capitalism. As a spatialized narrative, 53206 offers an empirical lens through which to consider the salience of territorial stigmatization as a concept. We analyze how 53206, as a discourse, serves as a spatial fix anchoring discussions of two interrelated and sustained crises over racialized poverty and policing in the city of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. 53206 fixes these problems within an apparently discrete space, where, for some, the place and people are ‘lost causes.’ This reification disconnects the production of poverty, segregation, and policing strategies from the broader political economy of the region, which naturalizes the effects of contemporary capitalism – including structural unemployment, austerity, and deepening concentration of wealth – and reproduces longstanding racist discourses of Black crime, economic decline, and family dysfunction (Greenbaum, 2015; Hinton, 2016; Muhammad, 2011). Despite the political and economic rifts dividing Milwaukee from surrounding white, wealthy suburbs and much of the rest of the state, both liberal and conservative solutions to the ills of 53206 rest on racialized ‘culture of poverty’ narratives of capitalist urban life. The claim that the persistence of poverty could be explained by cultural attributes of impoverished groups was advanced by anthropologist Oscar Lewis in the mid-20th century and came to be most associated with Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s report for the Kennedy administration, The Negro Family. The Moynihan report aimed to support public investment in job creation, yet it attributed Black poverty and high rates of unemployment among Black men to Black women – as both mothers and wage workers – and an ostensibly endogenous Black culture (Loyd, 2014; O’Connor, 2001).

Chapter 7   The Year 2020 and Its Aftermath   409

The idea that culture or the ‘breakdown’ of the family are the cause of poverty – rather than racialized patterns of exploitation, economic disinvestment, and abandonment – continues to circulate through terms like the underclass and concentrated poverty. Measures for the latter routinely use categories such as ‘female-headed household’ and community (dis) organization, and thereby situate poverty as a property of particular people and places (Crump, 2002). Rather than conceptualizing spaces of racialized poverty as relational, as interconnected with spaces of racialized wealth, such narratives of ‘bifurcation-segregation,’ following geographer Katherine McKittrick, reify ‘spaces of absolute otherness (slums, sites of man-made natural disaster, prisons, inner-city poverty, and death)’ (2011, p. 954). This analytic simultaneously marks people inhabiting these spaces as ‘actually not connected to us … precisely because they are dead and dying, because they live in slums and prisons, and thus are radically outside the conceptual boundaries of emancipation, humanness, and global citizenry’ (2011, p. 954, emphasis in original). As such, 53206 naturalizes the structural violence of racial capitalism and rationalizes policing as a legitimate – indeed necessary – feature of poor neighborhoods. In the remainder of this article, we bring together literatures on the political economy of racialized poverty and critical histories of policing in order to illustrate both the shared discursive frameworks of poverty and policing and how the latter serve to naturalize racial capitalism. We situate discourses surrounding 53206 historically and theoretically in order to explore how the racialization of this space – operating through the reification of poverty and crime as products of 53206 – serves to rationalize policing as a solution to violence and to further targeted neoliberal austerity and privatization measures. Our article analyzes how the spatial metaphor of 53206 connects with crises in the legitimacy of policing and politicians’ claims to care about Black lives. We conclude that the rhetorical posture of saving Black lives that is deployed by some elected officials has had the effect of entrenching policing power and further rendering the broader Northside of the city as already dead and dying (McKittrick, 2011).

Historical and Conceptual Background To theorize the connections among geographies of race, poverty, and crime, we bring critical analyses of urban poverty together with critical criminology and critical theories of racism. In bringing these literatures together we emphasize the co-constitution of ‘crime’ and ‘poverty’ as racialized categories within social thought (cf. Hinton, 2016; Muhammad, 2011). As critical geographers, we draw on a tradition of scholarship that theorizes how space and social categories (such as crime or poverty) are materially and discursively produced.

410  PART III    Crises and Ways Forward […] In the US context, white supremacy became a foundational logic through which the settler colonial dispossession of land, the attempted erasure of Indigenous peoples, and the enslavement of peoples from Africa constituted the nation, wealth, and identity (Bonds & Inwood, 2016).

Conceptualizing Stigma, Space, and Race Stigma has a relatively long lineage within the social sciences. As developed by Erving Goffman (1963), stigma has been used to analyze the systematic labeling (or ‘stereotyping’) and poor treatment of people with bodily and cognitive differences. Stigma has entered popular usage, though Goffman’s concept has also been widely criticized for its individualistic and interpersonal focus. Link and Phelan write that in ‘contrast to “stigma,” “discrimination” focuses the attention of research on the producers of rejection and exclusion  – those who do the discriminating – rather than on the people who are the recipients of these behaviors’ (2001, p. 366). Link and Phelan, in turn, insist on investigating stigmatization as a powerladen process that sustains systematic discrimination and disadvantage in life chances (2001, p. 371). Imogen Tyler in this issue further develops Link and Phelan’s analysis by questioning ‘Goffman’s decidedly apolitical account of stigma.’ […] The question we ask is whether the term territorial stigmatization is suited to the task of explaining the past and present processes of racial capitalism that shape Milwaukee’s economic and social divides. Is territorial stigmatization distinctive to the contemporary ‘post-industrial’ moment? Does the attempt to account for change from ‘traditional’ symbolic geographies impose an unwitting binary chronology/typology of the (pre-)Fordist ghetto and post-Fordist stigmatized place? Does this proposed temporal break obscure continuities of both racial capitalism and racialized criminalization practices? Does a neutral sounding term like territorial stigmatization enable us, as white residents who live in and research racially and class-divided cities, to name how racism works? We raise these questions in a post-Civil Rights historical context that Bonilla-Silva (2014) and Melamed (2011) describe as a ‘colorblind’ era of racism. This is a moment following the end of de jure segregation and discrimination in which many believe that racism is over. […] Because this narrative that racism is over has accompanied global economic restructuring and enabled the dismantling of state spending and programs that foster greater social and economic equity, we are wary of concepts that seem to diminish the longevity and centrality of racism to US urban geographies and criminal legal system.

Chapter 7   The Year 2020 and Its Aftermath   411

Conceptualizing the Production of Poverty, Race, and Space […] In an ostensibly ‘colorblind’ era, apparently neutral terms like concentrated poverty, disadvantage, and neighborhood effects have circulated into popular and policy discourse in ways that displace attention to the ongoing roles that structural racism plays in producing interlinked spaces of class and racial segregation. Within this context, terms like ghetto, inner city, or in the case of Milwaukee, inner core, continue to circulate in popular and policy circuits, yet evidence for persistent segregation is discursively situated in the Jim Crow past. In other words, uneven geographies of wealth, poverty, employment, school spending, and health, etc. are viewed as the result of historical events and past racial thinking. This past is disconnected discursively from how it informs contemporary patterns of (dis)investment that continue to cement racial and economic inequality into the landscape. In turn, divisions in the contemporary metropolis ideologically can be attributed to the neutral workings of capitalist markets, public policy, and individual preference. Such explanations work to minimize racism, one of the central frames that comprise colorblind racism in Bonilla-Silva’s (2014) theorization. Yet, these euphemized terms are racialized; concentrated poverty and neighborhoods effects, like earlier terms underclass and culture of poverty draw on racialized and classed conceptualizations of poverty that ostensibly can be explained by culture, behavior, and the negative and dangerous effects of concentrating poor people together (Greenbaum, 2015; Loyd, 2014). These apparently non-racial terms exemplify cultural racism, a frame that ‘relies on culturally based arguments,’ to buttress colorblind racism (Bonilla-Silva, 2014, p. 76).

Racialization and the Co-constitution of Crime and Poverty The gendered and racialized rhetoric of poverty arising from the behavior and pathology of ‘stigmatized’ groups and places underpins dominant framings of and solutions to crime and ‘disorder.’ As previously explained, culture of poverty discourses draw from racist and heteropatriarchal tropes that pathologize and blame Black women for the breakdown of the normative family structure and for young Black men’s disorderliness and unemployment (Greenbaum, 2015; Hinton, 2016; Loyd, 2014). As such, the culture of poverty as an explanation imputes ‘stigma’ to oppressed groups, yet sidesteps the racial, gender, and class power relations constructing terms of so-called stigma. […] While some distinctions may be maintained between community policing and broken windows policing (Herbert, 2001), in popular discourse and

412  PART III    Crises and Ways Forward among the officials whom we analyze, community policing and broken windows policing are treated virtually interchangeably. Like culture of poverty discourses, the logic of broken windows attributes ‘disorder’ to individual and community-level pathologies that are also endogenous to places that can be understood as stigmatized. As Chief Flynn, speaking about crime in 53206, once explained ‘[w]here social dislocations exist we’re going to have a concentration of violence’ (CBS58 Staff, 2016). Indeed, Robin D. G. Kelley (2016) documents how Kelling and Wilson built on urban theorist Edward Banfield’s contention that poverty and inequality in the post-Civil Rights era were the result of cultural differences rather than structural racism (pp. 25–26). The premise of intervening in small infractions to prevent larger disorder has had rhetorical appeal because it both maps onto existing racialized conceptualizations of poverty and criminality (Camp & Heatherton, 2016), and because it recasts policing as neutral in the midst of a decades-long struggle against racialized policing. Community policing distinguishes itself from previous policing practices in its use of data to map ‘crime hotspots,’ which ideally allows police officers to target ‘bad guys’ and to get police out of their cars to engage with residents (Bishop, 2009). Because ‘data’ commonly are understood as neutral, the use of data-driven practices lends the appearance of community policing as an objective, forward-looking, and preventative practice. The targeting of low-income communities of color is justified as a matter of rationality and necessity: policing happens where crime happens.

Analyzing 53206 as a Spatial Euphemism While it is common to acknowledge that Milwaukee is segregated, this does not mean that the historical and contemporary processes fostering segregation are critically examined or condemned. […] Acknowledging segregation as a ‘factor’ does not tell us how it works as a socioeconomic force among others contributing to racial and inequality in the region. Instead, as a term segregation tends to be used to discuss static effects of unnamed processes or places that comprise or are assumed to comprise African-American residents, not processes themselves. This reification of racial capitalist processes renders poverty, crime, and other social ills as endogenous to those spaces and disconnected from policies and processes producing wealthy neighborhoods. During the Civil Rights movement era, Milwaukee was known to Black residents as the Selma of the North, a reference to the brutality of the South, which drew attention to this Midwestern city’s own vicious struggle over racism (Jones, 2009). Although Black residents made up just 15% of the city’s population in 1960, Milwaukee was already one of the most racially segregated cities in the nation at this time (Rose, 1992). Unabated racism has underpinned the city’s residential patterning and urban development,

Chapter 7   The Year 2020 and Its Aftermath   413

confining Milwaukee’s Black residents within the ‘inner core’ as white residents increasingly moved to the suburbs supported by urban and federal policies limiting Black mobility. The white suburbs surrounding the city encouraged and openly advertised racially restrictive housing covenants preventing non-whites from purchasing and renting housing. Recent research identifies over 100 such covenants in 16 of the 18 suburban areas in Milwaukee County, with 51 alone in the village of Wauwatosa, a wealthy suburb immediately to the west of the city (Bonds, Bettinger, & Van Eerden, 2016). These covenants, alongside the racist practices of blockbusting, real estate agreements, exclusionary zoning practices, and massive suburban investments, dramatically shaped the Milwaukee metropolitan region’s racial structure. As a result, the expansion of the city’s Black population was highly restricted to a narrow, northward trajectory, contained by the city’s urban boundary and surrounded by the almost exclusively white suburbs in the so-called WOW counties of Waukesha, Ozaukee, and Washington. Since the end of the Second World War, a range of public policies and private economic decisions have fueled deindustrialization, concentrated public and private economic investments in the suburbs ringing Milwaukee, and worked to dismantle public education and social welfare. As a result, the poverty rate in Milwaukee is 29%, a figure double that of the national poverty rate (14.8%) and more than double the statewide rate – a 30-year high – of 13% (Kennedy, 2015). The zip code 53206 is situated in Milwaukee’s predominantly Black Northside, still referred to as part of the city’s ‘inner core’ by longer term Milwaukee residents. It is bordered to the east by an interstate highway whose construction divided the historical Bronzeville neighborhood, and to the north, west, and south by other major urban thoroughfares (see Figure 1). The inner core was the area of focus for major urban renewal projects premised on ‘slum’ removal and highway building in the 1960s, resulting in the net loss of thousands of homes occupied by Black residents. Within this polarized metropolitan landscape, 53206 has become a spatial euphemism for social and economic disadvantage in Milwaukee, regularly invoked by news media, policy makers, and residents alike as shorthand for racialized crime and poverty. […] Milwaukee Police Department Chief Edward Flynn observed, ‘We have a famous ZIP code, 53206, and I always hear about it because so many prisoners come from there’ (Anderson, 2015). This international spotlight contributed to urgency felt locally that resulted in a series of community forums and discussions, special programming and reporting by media, and the development of an array of new policies and calls for reform at both the level of the city and the state. […] These discourses circulated in the midst of bipartisan concern about ‘mass incarceration’ and growing attention to policing, in part spurred by

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FIGURE 1  Expressways through Milwaukee’s inner core

the Black Lives Matter movement. In Milwaukee as in other American cities, police violence against and mistreatment of Black residents is a decades’ old issue. In the 1950s, Chicago had the highest overall number of police killings, but the disparity between Black and white residents killed by police was much higher in Milwaukee, where police killed Black people 29.5 times more frequently than white residents (Takagi, 1974/2014, p. 124). In the 1960s, MPD’s tactical squad unit intimidated open housing (anti-discrimination) activists, and civil rights activists claimed that a police tear gas canister was responsible for sparking a fire that destroyed one of their organizing

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spaces. The death of Black Milwaukee resident Ernest Lacy at the hands of the MPD tactical squad sparked the formation of a 125-organization large coalition against police violence in 1981. NAACP president Chris Belnavis called Lacy’s death ‘the 23rd victim in the last ten years who has lost his life at the hands of our police’ (Miner, 2013, p. 103). One officer was eventually fired, three were suspended, and the city settled a civil suit with the family. Organizing also led to legislative changes that ended the police chief’s lifetime appointment, and created oversight by the mayor, common council, and Fire and Police Commission (Miner, 2013, p. 104). The decades since have been punctuated by police abuse and neglect scandals. In the early 1990s, Jeffrey Dahmer killed 17 men and boys (many of whom were Black or Asian) in Milwaukee. Many residents contended that racism and homophobia fueled the MPD’s failure to take the murders seriously (Miner, 2013, p. 104). Edward Flynn began as police chief in 2008 on the heels of a corruption scandal, specifically tasked with the role of improving community relations. Flynn initially was ‘canonize[d]’ as responsible for a drop in homicides and improvement in police morale (Bishop, 2009). Yet, in 2011, he refused to answer questions about a group of police officers who named themselves ‘The Punishers,’ calling the group a ‘rumor’ (Miner, 2013, p. 107). In 2012, Derek Williams died by asphyxiation in the back of a police car. That same year, eight people sued the MPD’s 5th district over cavity and strip searches, forms of sexual assault, which they had endured during traffic stops. In 2016, the city settled the suit for $5 million, a settlement that one city alderman denounced as a ‘whimpification’ of the police (B. Taylor, 2016). The murder of Dontre Hamilton, who was resting in a downtown city park, by an MPD officer in 2014 led to a new round of organizing. His family launched Coalition for Justice, echoing efforts from the early 1980s, that used street mobilizations and other tactics to pressure for accountability and changes in MPD policy. Amidst this sustained mobilization for police reform and increase in homicides since 2014, the repetition of language identifying 53206 as a site of high poverty, unemployment, and crime has amplified. Perhaps best capturing the convergence of liberal and conservative framings of 53206 are the responses to violent crime coming from seemingly counterpoised officials: then Milwaukee Police Chief Ed Flynn and then Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke. Clarke, who identifies as African-American, was a law-and-order darling of Fox News, the NRA, the state Attorney General, and Republicans across the nation during his term as sheriff. As a vocal supporter of Donald Trump, he was given a platform at the 2016 Republican National Convention and was considered for a position in the Department of Homeland Security. Clarke has likened Black Lives Matter protests to terrorism, has vocally touted individual gun rights as a means of crime prevention, and claims that ‘there is no police brutality in America. We ended

416  PART III    Crises and Ways Forward that back in the ‘60s’ (Mock, 2015). Police Chief Flynn was positioned in the national media as the liberal contrast to Clarke’s ‘get tough’ style of policing (cf. Kaleem, 2016). For example, in December 2014, at the peak of street protests spurred by Dontre Hamilton’s murder, Flynn participated in a Black Lives Matter rally, and he pledged, alongside Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm, to address mass incarceration (Mock, 2015). The public conflict between Clarke and Flynn expressed political schisms within the state and nation. Clarke was first elected as Milwaukee County Sheriff during a special election, running as a Democrat despite his vocal embrace of conservatism. In 2014, Clarke was re-elected for a fourth term, bolstered primarily by white suburban voters with whom his tough-oncrime rhetoric resonated (Mock, 2015). Milwaukee County had been under court order since 2001 to resolve its deadly lack of health care in its jail and corrections center when Clarke took office. Clarke outsourced medical services to a private corporation, yet staffing levels remain poor (Hovorka, 2017). Between 2008 and 2012, 10 people died while in the sheriff’s custody (Barton, 2014). In 2016 alone, four people died in county custody, including an infant whose mother gave birth while held in maximum security and a man who died of dehydration after being denied water for days while in isolation in the jail (Lombardo, 2016; Willms, 2016). Amidst these and other controversies, Clarke resigned from office in 2017. During his term as sheriff, Clarke advocated for an intensified broken windows approach to higher rates of crime, including an expanded and ‘consistently visible’ presence of police, increased traffic stops, and harsher penalties for low-level offenses, arguing that this approach must include ‘tactics like stop-question-and-frisk’ and ‘continual warrant sweeps to get these bad apples off the street’ (Bee & Bayatpour, 2016). He contrasted his aggressive approach to that of Chief Flynn, whom he characterized as a liberal who coddles criminals (cf. Kaleem, 2016). Yet, broken windows architect George Kelling approvingly notes that under Flynn’s watch, there were 400,000 ‘contacts’ between Milwaukee residents and police in 2015 alone (Anderson, 2016). Flynn frequently emphasized the need to build relationships with heavily policed communities and champions broken windows policing that is data-driven and discretionary (Toobin, 2015). While Flynn promoted this approach as an alternative to racialized policing, Brian Jordan Jefferson (2018) demonstrates how predictive policing ‘legitimizes the widespread criminalization of racialized districts’ (p. 11). A longtime ally of former big city police commissioner and broken windows proponent William Bratton, Flynn claims that reading Kelling and Wilson’s 1982 article changed the course of his career (Bishop, 2009). Flynn has been lauded widely as an epitome of community policing. […] While Clarke attributed the challenges facing poor neighborhoods of color to ‘Black-on-Black violence’ and failing family structures, Flynn

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expresses empathy for the systematic neglect of Black communities. Speaking during the uprising following the police shooting of Sylville Smith, Flynn proclaimed that ‘the neighborhoods that depend on us [the police] the most are also the ones that have been the most historically ignored’ (Kaleem, 2016). One way that criticism of police violence has been countered rhetorically is through invoking the frame of ‘Black-on-Black crime’ as the more fundamental issue. Khalil Muhammad (2012) contends that such arguments ‘play the violence card,’ which ‘perpetuates the reassuring notion that violence against black people is not society’s concern but rather a problem for black people to fix on their own’ because it stems from ‘a failure of lower-class black culture … not a problem with social and institutional roots that needs to be addressed through collective effort well beyond the boundaries of black communities.’ Despite their differences, Barrett, Flynn, and Clarke deploy different versions of this frame. For Clarke, the answer was law-and-order. Barrett and Flynn rework the violence card to reject the idea that violence in Black communities is solely a Black concern. […] Upon closer scrutiny, the distinctions between Clarke’s law-and-order approach and Flynn and Barrett’s compassionate community approaches become more difficult to discern. For all of Flynn’s commitment to improving relations with low-income neighborhoods of color, in 2011, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported that Flynn’s police department stopped Black car drivers 7 to 12 times more often than they pulled over white people, a much more pronounced rate than in Clarke’s countywide jurisdiction (Mock, 2015). Both Clarke and Flynn endorse the benefits of broken windows policing and advocate for an expanded police force, even as Flynn’s community policing approach is represented as smoothing racial and class conflict. Illustrating the connections between liberal benevolence and institutions of social control (Murakawa, 2014; Schept, 2015), Flynn and Barrett advocate for expanded policing in low-income communities of color that is protective and preventative while disavowing the relationships among systematic policing, the city’s racial inequality, and the state’s racialized pattern of incarceration. In short, the apparent dichotomy between law-and-order and community policing better represents a consensus on the legitimacy and necessity of policing.

Conclusion: Dismantling 53206 ? Police Reforms and Other Strategies to Avoid Ending White Supremacy The discourse of 53206 seems to offer a clear example of territorial stigmatization whereby ‘noxious representations of space are produced, diffused, and harnessed in the field of power … in ways that alter social

418  PART III    Crises and Ways Forward identity, strategy, and structure’ (Wacquant et al., 2014, p. 1273). One of the elements of this process that Wacquant et al. identify – how particular spaces serve as ‘vortexes and vectors of social disintegration’ that threaten other spaces (2014, p. 1274, emphasis in original) – is evident in a statement that State Assembly member Janel Brandtjen made regarding Milwaukee’s crime. Brandtjen, who does not represent Milwaukee, but a district in neighboring Waukesha County, warned Milwaukee Mayor Barrett: ‘I will be openly advocating for funding cuts to Milwaukee unless steps are taken to dramatically cut crime in Milwaukee. I will no longer sit by while you destroy Milwaukee and its flourishing suburbs. I cannot justify financing your failed policies in Milwaukee until you take public safety seriously’ (Glauber  & Marley, 2016). […] […] We contend that the abstraction of territorial stigmatization as a concept, while offering the potential for comparison across places, is a neutralizing term, which militates against the grounded histories and contemporary workings of racial capitalism. As proposed by Wacquant (2007) and advanced by Wacquant et al. (2014), territorial stigmatization is conceptualized as a process distinctive to post-industrial cities or the turn of the 21st century, and yet one that builds on earlier forms of racial and class defamation. As a concept, we are presented with distinctiveness and continuity, yet no clear reasoning for the shift, why these historical dynamics differ, and how territorial stigmatization better explains specific workings of racial capitalism. […] We are wary about a concept defined by a temporal break because in the US context, discourses on racism and power relations structuring segregation similarly invoke contemporary logics that are distinct from the past. During this ‘colorblind’ moment, history is recounted in ideological ways that serve to isolate structures of white racial rule to the past, thereby disavowing the role that accumulated white wealth and power play in the persistence of racialized poverty and racial and class conflict. […] […] Kelling’s narrative of contemporary police–Black resident conflict begins in the 1960s when: ‘Many of the neighborhoods were broken down. … [A]ll the agencies of social control, all the agencies of socialization really came under well-meaning, but nevertheless an assault that broke down their ability to maintain order and to keep youths, especially, under control. And so Milwaukee started, along with most other cities at the time, a movement towards increased crime, but also antagonism developed between police and the African American community’ (Anderson, 2016). Kelling implicitly names the Civil Rights movement as responsible for social ‘breakdown,’ which then necessitates community policing to restore social order and repair community relations. […] Yet, this past can only exist by erasing the violence of Jim Crow and the longstanding role of police in maintaining this order.

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Dominant framings of 53206 largely obscure the roles that decades of deindustrialization and labor assaults, metropolitan racial and wealth segregation, and public school and welfare restructuring play in the deepening of racial income and wealth gaps. Instead, bipartisan discussions rehearse racializing narratives of broken Black homes, Black-on-Black crime, and uncaring Black communities, which are largely unreconstructed from Moynihan’s 1965 The Negro Family. The discursive linking of this space with race and violence produces its own set of solutions. Liberal and conservative solutions to the problems of 53206 advocate stronger involvement of Black men in the home, entrepreneurialism, and policing, while liberal versions add job training for Black men, prison reentry programs, and workfare. Such moralizing terms of individual responsibility, redemption, resilience, and respectability reproduce neoliberal and colorblind myths of equal opportunity (Cope & Latcham, 2009; Lawson & Elwood, 2014). As white scholars residing in segregated cities, we need to be able to speak about white supremacy in relation to neoliberal capitalist austerity and how state racial violence shores up sociospatial divides. Rather than treating territorial stigmatization as novel, we have traced how discourses that depict segregation as a static attribute of a bounded place, like 53206, sustain contemporary forms of racial capitalism and policing in Milwaukee precisely by negating history and sociospatial relationships that simultaneously create wealth and poverty. The historical construction of the material places in which we live evidences continuities of racial capitalism, not departures from the past as the territorial stigmatization thesis and colorblind ideologies would have us believe. If we are to consider the power of stigmatization, in this case its power is explicitly its racialization. While racialization is an element of the territorial stigmatization concept, it is focused on the symbolic dimension of how negative meanings of places are constructed and circulated. Why not just say racialization rather than subsume it to stigmatization? Further, representations, however important, are only one part of a broader theory of racism in which concepts of oppression, domination, and exploitation continue to have salience. The symbolic or discursive racialization of space, in this case 53206, is being used to rationalize further austerity and to entrench policing to ‘protect’ Black and white residents alike, thereby ‘weaponizing’ (Scambler, this issue) ‘poverty propaganda’ (Shildrick, this issue). […]

Funding This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

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422  PART III    Crises and Ways Forward Jefferson, B. J. (2018). Predictable policing: Predictive crime mapping and geographies of policing and race. The Annals of the Association of American Geography, 108, 1–16. Jones, P. D. (2009). The Selma of the North: Civil rights insurgency in Milwaukee. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kaleem, J. (2016, August 19). Amid Milwaukee unrest, a conservative black sheriff clashes with the city’s liberal white police chief. Los Angeles Times. Retrieved from http://www.latimes. com/nation/la-na-milwaukee-sheriff-david-clarke-20160816snap-story.html (last accessed 10 May 2018). Kaleem, J., & Simmons, A. M. (2016, November 5). Trump says African Americans are living in hell. That depends on what you mean by hell. Los Angeles Times. Retrieved from http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-global-black-america-snap-20161103story.html (last accessed 10 May 2018). Katz, M. B. (2015). What kind of problem is poverty? The archeology of an idea. In A. Roy & E. Crane (Eds.), Territories of poverty: Rethinking north and south (pp. 39–78). Athens: The University of Georgia Press. Kelley, R. D. G. (2016). Thug nation: On state violence and disposability. In J. T. Camp & C. Heatherton (Eds.), Policing the planet: Why the policing crisis led to Black Lives Matter (pp. 15–35). London, UK: Verso. Kelling, G. L., & Wilson, J. O. (1982, March). Broken windows: The police and neighborhood safety. The Atlantic. Retrieved from http://www.theatlantic.com/ magazine/archive/1982/03/broken-windows/304465/?single_page=true (last accessed 10 May 2018). Kennedy, B. (2015, February 18). America’s 11 poorest cities. CBS Moneywatch. Retrieved from http://www.cbsnews.com/media/americas-11-poorest-cities/11/ (last accessed 10 May 2018). Kirkness, P., & Tijé-Dra, A. (Eds.). (2017). Negative neighbourhood reputation and place attachment: The production and contestation of territorial stigma. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Larsen, T. S., & Delica, K. N. (2017, June 21). Conceptualizing the ‘blemish of place’: A review of the literature on territorial stigmatization. Paper presented at Nordic Geographers Meeting, Stockholm, Sweden. Lawson, V., & Elwood, S. (2014). Encountering poverty: Space, class, and poverty politics. Antipode, 46, 209–228. Leichenger, A. (2014). How one zip code in Milwaukee explains America’s mass incarceration problem. Think Progress. Retrieved from https://thinkprogress.org/ how-one-milwaukee-zip-code-explains-americas-mass-incarceration-problem66a6535d1c4/ (last accessed 11 May 2018). Levine, M. (2014). Zipcode 53206: A statistical snapshot of inner city distress in Milwaukee: 2000–2012. Center for Economic Development Data Brief, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Retrieved from https://www4.uwm.edu/ced/ publications/53206_revised.pdf (last accessed 10 May 2018). Lewis, P., Silverstone, T., Sambamurthy, A., & Lapinski, V. (2016, October 19). America’s most segregated city: The young black voters in Milwaukee. The Guardian. Retrieved from https:// www.theguardian.com/us-news/video/2016/oct/18/milwaukeewisconsin-segregation-young-black-voters-election-video (last accessed 10 May 2018).

Chapter 7   The Year 2020 and Its Aftermath   423 Link, B. G., & Phelan, J. C. (2001). Conceptualizing stigma. Annual Review of Sociology, 27, 363–385. Linnen, J., & Gosman, M. (2015, July 8). The rest of the story behind 53206. Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Retrieved from http://archive.jsonline.com/news/opinion/the-restof-the-story-behind-53206-b99534173z1-312674271.html (last accessed 10 May 2018). Lombardo, C. (2016, September 15). Death in county jail ruled homicide; cause of death was dehydration. Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Retrieved from http://www.jsonline. com/story/ news/investigations/2016/09/15/death-county-jail-ruled-homicide-inmatehad-no-water-days/89960362/ (last accessed 10 May 2018). Loyd, J. M. (2014). Health rights are civil rights: Peace and justice activism in Los Angeles, 1963–1978. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. McKittrick, K. (2006). Demonic grounds: Black women and the cartographies of struggle. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. McKittrick, K. (2011). On plantations, prisons, and a black sense of place. Social & Cultural Geography, 12, 947–963. Melamed, J. (2011). Represent and destroy: Rationalizing violence in the new racial capitalism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Miller, J. (2015, November 3). Save Wisconsin from ‘worst city for blacks’ ranking. Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Retrieved from http://archive.jsonline.com/blogs/purplewisconsin/339936551.html (last accessed 10 May 2018). Miner, B. (2013). Lessons from the heartland: A turbulent half-century of public education in an iconic American city. New York, NY: The New Press. Miner, B. (2017, January 28). A closer look at Milwaukee zip code 53206. Milwaukee Magazine. Retrieved from https://www.milwaukeemag.com/milwaukee-zipcode-53206/ (last accessed 10 May 2018). Mock, B. (2015, October 30). Why Milwaukee is the worst place to live for African Americans. The Atlantic City Lab. Retrieved from http://www.citylab. com/crime/2015/10/why-milwaukee-is-the-worst-place-to-live-for-africanamericans/413218/ (last accessed 10 May 2018). Muhammad, K. G. (2011). The condemnation of blackness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Muhammad, K. G. (2012, April 5). Playing the violence card. New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/06/opinion/playing-the-violence-card.html (last accessed 10 May 2018). Murakawa, N. (2014). The first civil right: How liberals built prison America. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. O’Connor, A. (2001). Poverty knowledge: Social science, social policy, and the poor in twentieth-century U.S. history. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Pawasarat, J. (2009). Ex-offender populations in Milwaukee. Employment and Training Institute, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Retrieved from http://www4.uwm.edu/ eti/2009/ExOffendersMilwaukeeCounty.pdf (last accessed 10 May 2018). Pawasarat, J., & Quinn, L. (2013). Wisconsin’s mass incarceration of African American males: Workforce challenges for 2013. Employment and Training Institute, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Retrieved from http://www4.uwm.edu/eti/2013/ BlackImprisonment.pdf (last accessed 10 May 2018).

424  PART III    Crises and Ways Forward Potter, S. (2016). Bar code. Milwaukee Magazine. Retrieved from https://www. milwaukeemag.com/bar-code/ (last accessed 10 May 2018). Pulido, L. (2000). Rethinking environmental racism: White privilege and urban development in Southern California. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 90, 12–40. Quinn, L. (2007). New indicators of neighborhood need in 53206: Neighborhood indicators of employment, economic well being of families, barriers to employment, and untapped opportunities. Employment and Training Institute, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Retrieved from https://www4.uwm.edu/eti/2007/53206N. pdf (last accessed 10 May 2018). Robinson, C. J. (1983). Black Marxism: The making of the Black radical tradition. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. Rose, H. M. (1992). The employment status of young adult black males residing in poverty house-holds: Recent Milwaukee County experience. Employment and Training Institute, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Retrieved from http://dc.uwm. edu/eti_pubs/173/ (last accessed 10 May 2018). Schept, J. (2015). Progressive punishment: Job loss, jail growth, and the neoliberal logic of carceral expansion. New York: New York University Press. Slater, T. (2013). Your life chances affect where you live: A critique of the ‘cottage industry’ of neighbourhood effects research. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 37, 367–387. Slater, T., & Anderson, N. (2011). The reputational ghetto: Territorial stigmatization in St Paul’s, Bristol. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 37, 530–546. Takagi, P. (2014). A garrison state in ‘democratic’ society. Social Justice, 40, 118–130 (original work published 1974). Taylor, B. (2016, January 19). Milwaukee Common Council approves $5 million settlement in strip search/body cavity search case. Fox 6. Retrieved from http:// fox6now.com/2016/01/19/milwaukee-common-council-approves-5-millionsettlement-in-strip-searchbody-cavity-search-case/ (last accessed 10 May 2018). Taylor, K.-Y. (2016). From #BlackLivesMatter to Black liberation. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books. Toobin, J. (2015, May 11). The Milwaukee experiment: What can one prosecutor do about the mass incarceration of African Americans? The New Yorker. Retrieved from http://www.new-yorker.com/magazine/2015/05/11/the-milwaukee-experiment (last accessed 10 May 2018). Wacquant, L. (2007). Urban outcasts: A comparative sociology of advanced marginality. Cambridge, UK: Polity. Wacquant, L. (2016). Revisiting territories of relegation: Class, ethnicity and state in the making of advanced marginality. Urban Studies, 53, 1077–1088. Wacquant, L., Slater, T., & Pereira, V. B. (2014). Territorial stigmatization in action. Environment and Planning A, 46, 1270–1280. Why does Wisconsin send so many black people to jail? (2013, September 18). BBC. Retrieved from www.bbc.com/news/magazine-24119398 (last accessed 10 May 2018).

Chapter 7   The Year 2020 and Its Aftermath   425 Willms, M. (2016, December 28). Milwaukee jailers blamed for newborn’s death. Courthouse News Service. Retrieved from https://www.courthousenews.com/ milwaukee-jailers-blamed-for-newborns-death/ (last accessed 10 May 2018). Wilson, B. M. (2002). Critically understanding race-connected practices: A reading of WEB Du Bois and Richard Wright. The Professional Geographer, 54, 31–41. Woods, C. (1998). Development arrested: Race, power, and the blues in the Mississippi Delta. London, UK: Verso.

CHAPTER 8 Cities in Control? Finding Solutions to Broad Issues Editors’ Introduction The COVID-19 pandemic underscored and exacerbated social polarization in the country. It also amplified the role of cities in polarizing political rhetoric. Former President Trump had started to frame cities as dysfunctional and dying right from the start of his presidency. In his 2017 inauguration speech, which was dubbed “American carnage,” he invoked many political (and racialized) tropes about cities that had been used in the 20th century: Mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities, rusted out factories, scattered like tombstones across the across the landscape of our nation, an education system flush with cash, but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of all knowledge, and the crime, and the gangs, and the drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential. This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.

The pandemic, which famously hit New York City early and hard in 2020, only exacerbated Republican anti-urban rhetoric. After the Trump administration had attempted to withdraw law enforcement grants from cities that had declared themselves “sanctuary jurisdictions” in the face of a record amount of immigration raids—a Trump campaign promise, the Trump Justice Department declared a number of cities “anarchist jurisdictions” in 2020, during the Black Lives Matter protests, and threatened to cut COVID aid packages to larger “blue” cities. This rhetoric was underscored by the

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Chapter 8   Cities in Control? Finding Solutions to Broad Issues   427

attacks the Trump campaign and its supporters launched against cities after the 2020 election. Their attacks on the election result specifically focused on the urban vote. In Pennsylvania, Trump singled out Philadelphia: At the first presidential debate of 2020, he claimed that “bad things happen in Philadelphia”. That same day, he had also tweeted out “Wow. Won’t let Poll Watchers & Security into Philadelphia Voting Places. There is only one reason why. Corruption!!! Must have a fair election.” After the election, the Trump campaign also claimed foul play and asked for recounts in Atlanta, Detroit, Madison, and Milwaukee, among others. All of these cities are located in swing states, and Republicans singled out exclusively urban and suburban counties where the Democrats had won, ignoring others, like Milwaukee’s deep-red suburbs, and much of the rest of the state of Wisconsin. Since the pandemic, Republicans have become explicitly political about their rhetoric on cities. Tom Cotton, Republican Senator from Arkansas, announced in April 2022, They want to make you live in downtown areas, high-rise buildings, walk to work or take the subway … They want to get you out of your pickup truck, out of your SUV, out of your home in the suburbs where you can have a backyard with your kids. (quoted in Grabar 2022)

Large cities in the United States, as most urban researchers commiserate, are undervalued and underfunded by the federal government. The famous Daily New headline from the 1970s, “Ford to City: Drop Dead!” may still ring in the heads of those researching political and financial power and federal-local relations in the United States. It became symbolic for the federal (and state) governments’ utter lack of interest in cities—even the nation’s largest, and most well-known one: New York City, on the verge of bankruptcy. Similarly, in the face of the country’s most serious recession crisis since 1929, and the near-death of Motown Detroit, the federal bailout dollars went to the city’s great automakers, and not the city itself, which continues to struggle with near-bankruptcy. It is no wonder, therefore, and especially in the face of serious political polarization in Washington, that urban researchers have started calling for cities to “go it alone.” But cities can actually present helpful solutions to many issues that nation states have a hard time solving. In Selection 25, Lindsay Volz explains the different ways in which cities led with great examples during the pandemic, among them health care access, urban administration, infrastructure, and housing. Cities may have been hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic, but they also made sure that their vulnerable populations received equitable

428  PART III    Crises and Ways Forward access to vaccines, and they opened communication channels to reach different residents and communities. According to Volz, cities also used their ARPA (American Rescue Plan Act) funds the most effectively, and were, despite their often severe financial shortfalls, able to recover more quickly and rehire many employees once ARPA funds became available. Cities also proved extremely innovative in re-thinking and adapting their infrastructure to changed needs under COVID. Expanded bike lanes, roads closed to car traffic, and expanded sidewalks and outdoor spaces for restaurants allowed residents to take advantage of outdoor space during the pandemic. As COVID temporarily paralyzed the American economy, and many residents were in danger of losing their housing, cities were quick to use their COVID funds to expand affordable housing options and better address the needs of their unhoused populations. Many cities also used their pandemic funds to invest in small businesses and boost local neighborhood initiatives, which helped keep people employed and in business. In Selection 27, Amy Liu and Adam Berube argue that cities, unlike their portrayal in former President Trump’s 2017 inaugural address, are the engines of the American economy. Not only are they not declining, but some cities across the country are its greatest sources of job- and economic growth. Similar to Volz, Liu and Berube also note that cities can be incubators for broader solutions to many socio-economic and political issues in the country as a whole. Issues like the technological divide, income polarization, systemic racism, and environmental challenges, such as climate change, are pressing issues on urban political agendas throughout the country. Unlike nation-states, cities present microcosms of their own for addressing these challenges, but they do this with more diplomacy and political dedication, and less opposition. Liu and Berube note that tackling those challenges will cost money, and that cities with their limited resources will need more support from the federal government. Furthermore, as socioeconomic differences between cities and rural areas are growing, political leadership should invest more in encouraging metropolitan collaboration, which could help alleviate disparities. Liu and Berube acknowledge that cities and rural areas are quite diverse, and that we cannot and should not portray them as socio-economic and political monoliths. Instead, we should understand that the country as a whole can prosper from their collaboration. While cities can hold the key to the country’s future, we should not minimize the challenges that the pandemic has brought them. Cities across the country declined (in some cases severely) in population, as Toukabri and Delbé show in Selection 26, regardless of their industries and socio-economic properties. Only a few metros gained in population, and

Chapter 8   Cities in Control? Finding Solutions to Broad Issues   429

they are overwhelmingly located in the country’s sunbelt. The city’s largest cities, on the other hand, experienced the most severe population losses, with New York City in first place, followed by San Francisco, Chicago, and Los Angeles. The increasingly prohibitive cost of living in many of these places, along with their more severe COVID restrictions may have made them less popular places to live for many Americans. So, cities do face challenges they urgently need to solve. They may just be more innovative at addressing. Political scientist Benjamin Barber, in our final selection, proposes an urban revolution—a deeply political one. Similar to Liu and Berube, Barber envisions cities as the future hubs of innovation and policymaking in a closely linked and interdependent global world. However, he sees majors and local democracy—not necessarily privatization—as the key force in this scenario. Barber envisions urban neighborhoods and communities as policy labs and democratic innovators, making it possible to democratically reimagine politics—on the basis of the input from the world’s great cities, and their networked communities. As he notes, “Are Sao Paulo, Tokyo, and New York that different today? The cross-border civil society we envision is simply the global network of partnerships and associations already sharing common civic values, of communities organized around the struggle for universal human rights, of religious associations with an ecumenical outlook, of international societies of artists and social networks of friends real and virtual alike spiraling outward to encompass strangers. Such a network is not waiting to be born but is already half-grown, waiting rather to be recognized, exploited, and formalized. These synapses that link urban nodes are already marking new pathways to interdependence.” Barber envisions a global league of cities, a parliament of mayors—a real project, which he spearheaded with his vision—where urban ideas and policy negotiation can transcend borders in the interest of policy and social innovation, and to get things done that cannot be accomplished at the national level. Cities can lead the way into the future—if we let them!

References Grabar, Henry. 2022. “Fear City: The Republican rhetoric about urban life – “disgusting and violent!” “Soaked in blood!” – has really gotten out of hand.” Slate, October 5, 2022. Accessed online: https://slate.com/business/2022/10/republicans-citiesdarren-bailey-jd-vance-tom-cotton-donald-trump.html Trump, Donald J. 2017. “Inauguration Speech Transcript. Full Text.” Politico, January 20, 2017. Accessed online: https://www.politico.com/story/2017/01/full-text-donaldtrump-inauguration-speech-transcript-233907

430  PART III    Crises and Ways Forward

25 5 Ways Cities Led in Pandemic Recovery Lindsey Volz * In the search for a big-city refuge from climate change, Chicago looks like an excellent option. At least, it does on a map. It stands a half-continent away from the threat of surging ocean levels. Its northern locale has protected it, to some extent, from southern heat waves. And droughts that threaten crops, forests and water supplies in so many places? Chicago hugs the shore of one of the grandest expanses of freshwater in the world. Water is, in fact, why Chicago exists. The nation’s third-largest city grew from a remarkable geographical quirk, a small, swampy dip in a continental divide that separates two vast watersheds: the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River Basin. In the 19th century, Chicagoans dug a canal linking those two watersheds, transforming their muddy town into a metropolis of commerce by making the riches of the American Midwest accessible to the world. The mule-drawn barges that worked its canals long ago gave way to trains, planes and eighteen-wheelers. Two years ago, cities around the country were confronted with an unprecedented challenge: the global COVID-19 pandemic. To respond, cities hit the ground running, implementing a host of innovative policies and practices designed to flatten the curve, maintain core government services, protect small businesses and so much more. NLC’s COVID-19 Local Action Tracker captures these stories and tracks the extraordinary steps cities have taken to support their communities during the COVID-19 pandemic. The tracker includes data from 800 distinct cities and more than 4,800 actions, including details on 672 American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) plans and proposals from local governments across the country. Over the last two years, city responses have shifted from focusing on addressing the immediate public health crisis to making more long-term investments using their ARPA funds. NLC’s new Local Government ARPA Investment Tracker, created in partnership with Brookings Metro and the National Association of Counties, highlights in detail how municipalities are accomplishing these long-term goals. To celebrate and acknowledge all that city leaders have done for their residents over the course of the pandemic, * This article was originally published by Lindsey Volz at the National League of Cities on CitiesSpeak on March 10th 2022 and is reprinted with permission. https://www.nlc.org/ article/2022/03/10/5-ways-cities-led-in-pandemic-recovery/

Chapter 8   Cities in Control? Finding Solutions to Broad Issues   431

we updated the Local Action Tracker to highlight five major areas where many cities have invested their ARPA funds—public health, city operations, infrastructure, housing, and economic and workforce development.

Public Health In the face of an unprecedented global pandemic, city leaders moved quickly to enact policies that ensured the health and safety of their residents. Cities prioritized creating effective communication channels to share evolving public health information related to social distancing, hand washing and mask-wearing. They invested their ARPA funds in public health initiatives to prevent the spread of COVID-19, from offering incentive programs for residents to get vaccinated to funding emergency response needs such as ambulances and mobile health clinics. In Buffalo, NY, the city council prioritized equitable vaccine distribution by meeting with the city’s African American Health Equity Task Force to improve vaccine access for inner-city neighborhoods, specifically by increasing their availability at health community centers for those who are most vulnerable. Once ARPA funds became available, the city utilized the money to implement public health programming that focused on equitable access to healthcare, including establishing a community clinic in one of Buffalo’s lowest-income communities. Other cities used their ARPA funds to demystify the spread and impact of COVID-19 in their communities and provide information to residents on how to respond. In Louisville, KY, the city used $22.5 million of its ARPA allocation to create a public data dashboard showcasing caseload metrics and to provide public health recommendations to the community. The city also provided funding to support public health compliance and reporting efforts. Similarly, in April 2020, Milwaukee, WI launched a COVID-19 webpage on the city’s website to offer more information about the pandemic and the best ways for residents to stop the spread.

City Operations Cities experienced financial shortfalls with decreased economic activity in their communities, which impacted city revenue from taxes and fees. At the same time, increased funding for public health programming was necessary to address the COVID-19 pandemic. Needing to balance their budgets, cities were forced to take fiscally responsible steps that included temporarily furloughing city staff and reducing services. When their ARPA funds became available, municipalities bounced back, hiring additional employees to better provide essential services to their residents, rehiring and protecting the salaries of municipal workers, and offering hazard and premium pay to those frontline workers who took on extra responsibilities during the pandemic.

432  PART III    Crises and Ways Forward After requiring most municipal employees to work from home and being forced to lay off 17 employees and cut 15 vacant positions within the city, Cheyenne, WY allocated more than $700,000 of its $12.2 million in ARPA funds to rehire city staff into their positions and another $1.7 million to cover premium pay for essential workers. The additional staff hired will ensure that city services, such as library, public safety and maintenance operations, are fully supported moving forward. Both Pittsburgh, PA and Easton, PA have allocated a portion of their ARPA funds to maintaining and improving city services. In August 2021, Pittsburgh began rehiring about 100 labor positions that had gone unfilled during the hiring freeze using its ARPA funds, greatly improving access to essential city services for residents. After announcing in April 2020 that the city was projected to experience a revenue gap of $5.5 million (17.6% of the city’s annual budget) in light of COVID-19, Easton has used its ARPA funds to restore essential services and jobs that were previously cut.

Infrastructure Cities invested in improvements to failing infrastructure to meet their changing needs and ensure communities remain safe and healthy well into the future. As community members spent more time at home and in their immediate neighborhoods, the inadequacy of necessary infrastructure became increasingly apparent. Many residents began to prioritize different types of spaces. In NLC’s 2021 State of the Cities report, city leaders identified the availability of parks, recreation and green space as one of the top conditions that supported communities through the pandemic. For the past two years, cities have used their pandemic relief funds to support improvements from parks and sewer systems to broadband networks and transit systems. In March 2020, New York, NY launched a pilot program that added additional temporary bike lanes along major corridors to improve bike safety and accessibility as more people turned to active transportation options for their commute. To encourage people to stay active, the city announced in April 2020 that it planned to open at least 40 miles of street space to pedestrian and bike traffic. The program was successful in getting people outdoors, leading then-Mayor Bill de Blasio to sign legislation expanding the program significantly and making many of the open streets permanent. Now New Yorkers can enjoy walking, biking and other activities on Open Streets in more than 100 active locations across the city. Other municipalities invested in infrastructure that helped small businesses survive the pandemic. Dayton, OH launched pop-up patios so that customers could still access local goods and services while following public health guidelines in improved and new outdoor customer areas. In spring 2020, Raleigh, NC created about 100 temporary curbside pickup zones to help residents more easily access local businesses and restaurants

Chapter 8   Cities in Control? Finding Solutions to Broad Issues   433

safely. The sites of the curbside pickup zones are included on a map on the city website, which was regularly updated as the pandemic situation changed.

Housing Job losses, school closures and child and family care responsibilities led to significant economic challenges for many Americans over the course of the pandemic. These negative economic impacts resulted in an increase in housing instability across the nation, particularly for renters who were at increased risk of eviction. But cities worked hard to keep their residents housed during this extended period of uncertainty. Housing insecurity dropped dramatically in cities across the U.S. after the passage of the CARES Act in March 2020, when local governments started using their funds to support affordable housing programs and utility expenses and provide services for their homeless populations. Boulder, CO created a COVID-19 Response Center as a non-medical space for people experiencing homelessness to receive vital care while recovering from COVID-19 or to isolate themselves while contagious. The city is also using its ARPA funds to provide emergency rental assistance and other eviction prevention services, including legal services and mediation through Boulder’s Community Mediation and Resolution Center. In combination with the Emergency Rental Assistance funds allocated by ARPA, many cities have allocated their State and Local Fiscal Recovery Funds to keep their residents securely housed. Benton Harbor, MI is using $600,000 of its $9.8 million for rental assistance and another $300,000 for water assistance. Lakewood, OH is giving a portion of its ARPA funds to a local nonprofit, the Lakewood Community Services Center, with the aim of financially supporting more than 400 families that were projected to experience severe housing instability when the CDC’s eviction moratorium ended in June 2021.

Economic & Workforce Development The public health crisis led to financial strain for many small businesses, forcing many to close their doors temporarily, or in some cases, permanently. Cities used their pandemic relief funds to support entrepreneurs and bolster their local economics in more inclusive ways in the long term. Many used their funds to address existing inequities in capital access and provide business support opportunities for underrepresented groups. And it worked: applications for new businesses skyrocketed after the implementation of the CARES Act, as cities used their funds to help local businesses reopen and recover. To address the needs of its local workforce during the pandemic, Boston, MA invested an additional $2.4 million in its Neighborhood Jobs Trust fund in June 2020. The fund includes educational and financial support for college students, remote learning assistance for English language learners, job retraining and funding for organizations that assist in Boston’s long-term

434  PART III    Crises and Ways Forward economic recovery. The city’s ARPA funds, which included $4.6 million for green jobs and jobs for young adults, allowed Boston to help its workforce not only bounce back but grow as the city emerged from the pandemic. Many cities invested in small businesses and workforce development to protect the economic wellbeing of their residents. In March 2020, Sacramento, CA created a $1 million economic relief fund to help small businesses impacted by the pandemic. ARPA funds enabled the city to expand its small business support with an additional $8.2 million to help create new small business grants, receive technical resources and implement other tools to help businesses succeed. To address immediate workforce shortages and provide residents with the tools necessary to advance their careers, Syracuse, NY utilized its ARPA funds to create job training programs focused on bringing underrepresented communities into fields such as construction and technology, including stipends so that workers that held other jobs could take time off to get trained. The introduction of federal funds through the CARES Act and ARPA in the last two years meant that cities could not only address the immediate needs of their residents during this public health crisis, but also invest in long-term projects that will improve their communities for years to come. City leaders have been challenged to think on their feet and play a critical role in developing countless creative and innovative solutions that address the ever-changing dynamics of the pandemic.

26 New Data Reveal Most Populous Cities Experienced Some of the Largest Decreases Amel Toukabri and Crystal Delbé † While the COVID-19 pandemic has not officially ended, the U.S. Census Bureau’s first release of population estimates for cities and towns this decade reveals how population growth trends shifted during the first year of the pandemic. Some of the fastest-growing cities before the pandemic grew at a much slower rate after it started, changing the rankings among the top 15 gainers. While many rankings of cities and towns remained roughly the same, there were notable differences in the magnitudes of change. † ‘New Data Reveal Most Populous Cities Experienced Some of the Largest Decreases’, Amel Toukabri and Crystal Delbé, United States Census Bureau, May 26th 2022. https://www.census. gov/library/stories/2022/05/population-shifts-in-cities-and-towns-one-year-into-pandemic.html

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The new estimates show that some fast-growing cities in 2019 grew at a slower rate in 2021. At the same time, others grew at a faster pace during the pandemic. Overall, growth rates slowed in the nation’s biggest cities and some states experienced an uptick in population due to migration to the South and West in the first year after the pandemic hit.

How City Growth Rates Changed As of July 1, 2021, six of the top 15 fastest-growing cities (or towns) with populations of 50,000 or more were also among the top fastest growing in the pre-pandemic July 1, 2019, estimates. While the list was mostly similar, growth slowed for some. Leander, Texas, top-ranked in 2019 with a 12.0% increase from 2018, slipped to second place with a 10.1% growth from 2020 to 2021. In Idaho, Meridian’s growth fell from 7.2% in 2019 to 5.2% in 2021, slipping from sixth to 13th in the rankings (Tables 1 and 2). TABLE 1 The 15 Fastest-Growing U.S. Cities or Towns: July 1, 2020July 1, 2021 Rank

City/town

Percent Increase

2021 total Population

 1

Georgetown, TX

10.5

75,420

 2

Leander, TX

10.1

67,124

 3

Queen Creek, AZ

8.9

66,346

 4

Buckeye, AZ

8.6

101,315

 5

New Braunfels, TX

8.3

98,857

 6

Fort Myers, FL

6.8

92,245

 7

Casa Grande, AZ

6.2

57,699

 8

Maricopa, AZ

6.1

62,720

 9

North Port, FL

5.5

80,021

10

Spring Hill, TN

5.4

53,339

11

Goodyear, AZ

5.4

101,733

12

Port St. Lucie, FL

5.2

217,523

13

Meridian, ID

5.2

125,963

14

Caldwell, ID

5.2

63,629

15

Nampa, ID

5.0

106,186

Source: U.S. Census Bureau, Vintage 2021 Population Estimates. Note: Cities or towns with populations of 50,000 or more.

436  PART III    Crises and Ways Forward TABLE 2 The 15 Fastest-Growing U.S. Cities or Towns: July 1, 2018July 1, 2019 Rank

City/town

Percent Increase

2019 total Population

 1

Leander, TX

12.0

 2

Apex, NC

10.1

59,300

 3

Chico, CA

9.5

103,301

 4

Doral, FL

8.2

65,741

 5

Bentonville, AR

7.4

54,909

 6

Meridian, ID

7.2

114,161

 7

Georgetown, TX

7.2

79,604

 8

Buckeye, AZ

7.1

79,620

 9

New Braunfels, TX

6.8

90,209

10

Redmont, WA

6.7

71,929

11

Frisco, TX

6.4

200,490

62,608

12

Fort Myers, FL

5.9

87,103

13

Lehi, UT

5.7

69,724

14

Castle Rock, CO

5.4

68,484

15

Milpitas, CA

5.0

84,196

Source: U.S. Census Bureau, Vintage 2021 Population Estimates. Note: Cities or towns with populations of 50,000 or more.

Different Cities Experiencing Decline San Francisco was not among the 15 fastest-declining cities in 2019 but topped the list in 2021 with a 6.3% drop in population from the previous year. Six of the cities on the declining list in 2021 were in California. And major cities, including Boston and Washington, D.C., also made the list. Even though only one city—Cupertino, California—was one of the 15 fastest-declining in both 2019 and 2021, the magnitude of the drop (in its population growth rate) nearly tripled (Tables 3 and 4). Overall, the pre-pandemic population losses from 2018 to 2019 (Table 4) were much lower than after the pandemic hit (Table 3). For instance, Petaluma, California, had the largest percentage population decline from July 1, 2018 to July 1, 2019, a drop of 2.1%. But that drop would not even have ranked among the top 15 in 2020-2021, after the start of the pandemic. These rates of population decline of 5% or more in a single year were nearly unprecedented.

Chapter 8   Cities in Control? Finding Solutions to Broad Issues   437

TABLE 3 The 15 Fastest-Declining U.S. Cities or Towns: July 1, 2020July1, 2021 Rank

City/town

Percent decrease

2021 total Population

 1

San Francisco, CA

−6.3

815,201

 2

Lake Charles, LA

−5.0

81,097

 3

Reverie, MA

−4.0

59,075

 4

Union City, NJ

−3.6

65,638

 5

New York, NY

−3.5

8,467,513

 6

Bayonne, NJ

−3.3

69,211

 7

Daly City, CA

−3.2

101,243

 8

Hoboken, NJ

−3.1

58,690

 9

Redwood City, CA

−3.0

81,643

10

San Mateo, CA

−3.0

102,200

11

Washington, DC

−2.9

670,050

12

Boston, MA

−2.9

654,776

13

Cupertino, CA

−2.9

58,622

14

South San Francisco, CA

−2.8

64,251

15

Alexandria, VA

−2.8

154,706

Source: U.S. Census Bureau, Vintage 2021 Population Estimates. Note: Cities or towns with populations of 50,000 or more.

Population decline can result from a variety of causes, including natural disasters such as hurricanes and wildfires. For example, Hurricane Laura, a destructive Category 4 hurricane in August 2020, may have contributed to the population losses of Lake Charles, Louisiana, the second-fastest declining city with a decrease of 5.0% from 2020 to 2021.

Population Gains One year into the pandemic, Phoenix, Arizona—the city with the largest numeric increase from 2018 to 2019—moved into second place, switching places with San Antonio. Its population gain of 13,626 was roughly half what it had added in 2019. In addition, San Antonio and Fort Worth, Texas, and Meridian, Idaho, while still among the 15 cities with the largest numeric increases, all showed notably smaller increases.

438  PART III    Crises and Ways Forward TABLE 4 The 15 Fastest-Declining U.S. Cities or Towns July 1, 2018July 1, 2019 Rank

City/town

Percent decrease

2019 total Population

 1

Petaluma, CA

−2.1

60,520

 2

Jackson, MS

−1.9

160,628

 3

Albany, GA

−1.5

72,130

 4

Baltimore, MD

−1.5

593,490

 5

Ventura, CA

−1.5

109,106

 6

Grand Forks, ND

−1.4

55,839

 7

Kissimmee, FL

−1.4

72,717

 8

Palo Alto, CA

−1.3

65,364

 9

Cupertino, CA

−1.2

59,276

Ann Arbor, MI

−1.2

119,980

Shreveport, LA

−1.2

187,112

10 11 12

Mesquite, TX

−1.1

140,937

13

Port Arthur, TX

−1.1

54,280

14

North Miami, FL

−1.0

62,822

15

Pico Rivera, CA

− 1.0

62,027

Source: U.S. Census Bureau, Vintage 2021 Population Estimates. Note: Cities or towns with populations of 50,000 or more.

Collectively, the total population increase for the nation’s 15 largestgaining cities was a little over 187,100 people before the pandemic hit, compared to about 129,000 a year into it (Tables 5 and 6).

Population Losses While New York City remained the city with the largest numeric decrease, its population decline in 2021 (305,465) was nearly six times its numeric decrease in 2019 (53,624). Chicago, Illinois, had a similar experience. Still ranked third with a numeric decrease of 45,175 in 2021, its population dropped by only 7,447 (six times less) in 2019. All told, the cities with the largest numeric drop in population had a combined loss of nearly 609,800 a year into the pandemic, compared to about 102,700 between 2018 and 2019 (Tables 7 and 8).

Chapter 8   Cities in Control? Finding Solutions to Broad Issues   439

TABLE 5 The 15 U.S. Cities With Largest Numeric Gains: July 1, 2020July 1, 2021 Rank

City/town

Numeric Increase

2021 total Population

 1

San Antonio, TX

13,626

1,451,853

 2

Phoenix, AZ

13,224

1,624,569

 3

Fort Worth, TX

12,916

935,508

 4

Port St. Lucie, FL

10,771

217,523

 5

North Las Vegas, NV

9,917

274,133

 6

Cape Coral, FL

8,220

204,510

 7

Buckeye, AZ

8,001

101,315

 8

Frisco, TX

7,933

210,719

 9

New Braunfels, TX

7,538

98,857

10

Georgetown, TX

7,193

75,420

11

Meridian, ID

6,234

125,963

12

Leander, TX

6,159

67,124

13

Fort Myers, FL

5,891

92,245

14

Denton, TX

5,844

148,146

15

McKinney, TX

5,568

202,690

Source: U.S. Census Bureau, Vintage 2021 Population Estimates. Note: Cities or towns with populations of 50,000 or more.

Small Town Population Trends The 2021 population estimates released today also provide a regional perspective on growth in cities and towns of all sizes. On average, small towns with populations of less than 5,000 experienced uneven growth across U.S. regions: • In the Northeast, the populations of small towns decreased on average by 0.2%. • In the Midwest, small towns experienced no change on average. • In the South, small towns grew on average by 0.4%. • In the West, small towns saw the largest growth, with an average increase of 1.1%.

440  PART III    Crises and Ways Forward TABLE 6 The 15 U.S. Cities With Largest Numeric Gains: July 1, 2018July 1, 2019 Rank

City/town

Numeric Increase

2019 total Population

 1

Phoenix, AZ

26,317

1,680,992

 2

San Antonio, TX

17,237

1,547,253

 3

Austin, TX

16,439

978,908

 4

Fort Worth, TX

16,369

909,585

 5

Charlotte, NC

13,194

885,708

 6

Frisco, TX

12,038

200,490

 7

Seattle, WA

11,440

753,675

 8

Denver, CO

10,946

727,211

 9

Henderson, NV

10,671

320,189

10

Mesa, AZ

10,067

518,012

11

Jacksonville, FL

9,070

911,507

12

Chico, CA

8,959

103,301

13

Atlanta, GA

8,628

506,811

14

Las Vegas, NV

8,091

651,319

15

Meridian, ID

7,697

114,161

Source: U.S. Census Bureau, Vintage 2021 Population Estimates. Note: Cities or towns with populations of 50,000 or more.

How We Calculate Estimates Unlike the decennial census, which aims to count every person living in the United States, the annual population and housing unit estimates for states, counties, cities and towns are developed using various administrative data sources, such as birth and death certificates and tax return statistics on people who changed residences. The decennial census serves as a starting point for each decade of subcounty population estimates. Cities and towns are more likely than larger geographies to annex land or disincorporate. We apply these types of legal boundary changes to the decennial census to create an updated base for population and housing units. Such geographic updates are made annually, so that each new time series of estimates we produce begins from a newly updated geographic base. This “estimates base” created from the census is essential to accurately distributing the population.

Chapter 8   Cities in Control? Finding Solutions to Broad Issues   441

TABLE 7 The 15 U.S. Cities With Largest Numeric Declines: July 1, 2020-July 1, 2021 Rank

City/town

Numeric Decrease

2021 total Population

 1

New York, NY

−305,465

8,467,513

 2

San Francisco, CA

−54,813

815,201

 3

Chicago, IL

−45,175

2,696,555

 4

Los Angeles, CA

−40,537

3,849,297

 5

San Jose, CA

−27,419

983,489

 6

Philadelphia, PA

−24,754

1,576,251

 7

Washington, DC

−20,043

670,050

 8

Boston, MA

−19,496

654,776

 9

Dallas, TX

−14,777

1,288,457

10

Houston, TX

−11,777

2,288,250

11

Portland, OR

−11,226

641,162

12

Nashville, TN

−10,397

678,851

13

Long Beach, CA

−8,697

456,062

14

Jersey City, NJ

−8,000

283,927

15

St. Louis, MO

−7,218

293,310

Source: U.S. Census Bureau, Vintage 2021 Population Estimates. Note: Cities or towns with populations of 50,000 or more.

TABLE 8 The 15 U.S. Cities With Largest Numeric Declines: July 1,  2018-July 1, 2019 Rank

City/town

Numeric Decrease

2019 total Population

 1

New York, NY

−53,264

8,336,817

 2

Baltimore, MD

−8,953

593,490

 3

Chicago, IL

−7,447

2,693,976

 4

San Jose, CA

−6,225

1,021,795

 5

Long Beach, CA

−3,237

462,628

 6

Jackson, MS

−3,144

160,628

 7

Detroit, MI

−2,946

670,031 (Continued)

442  PART III    Crises and Ways Forward TABLE 8 (Continued) Rank

City/town

Numeric Decrease

2019 total Population

 8

St. Louis, MO

−2,843

300,576

 9

Anchorage, AL

−2,521

288,000

10

Shreveport, LA

−2,248

187,112

11

Cleveland, OH

−2,205

381,009

12

Toledo, OH

−2,085

272,229

13

Baton Rouge, LA

−1,954

220,236

14

Honolulu, HI

−1,881

345,064

15

Garland, TX

−1,781

239,928

Source: U.S. Census Bureau, Vintage 2021 Population Estimates. Note: Cities or towns with populations of 50,000 or more.

27 Big Cities Aren’t Dividing America. They Hold the Key to Our Collective Future Amy Liu and Alan Berube ‡ Over the past several years, it’s become increasingly convenient to label cities and metro areas as “blue” and prosperous and rural areas as “red” and distressed. This dichotomy pits urban and rural communities on opposite sides of America’s economic, political, and cultural divides. The fault lines are real, at least in the aggregate. They are evident in the economic gulf between Biden and Trump counties in the 2020 election, and in the widening growth chasm between rural and urban counties revealed in the 2020 census. They have spurred growing calls to save American democracy by way of taming urban America and reinvigorating smaller towns.

‡ Source: Brookings Metro, ‘Big cities aren’t dividing America. They hold the key to our collective future’ by Amy Liu and Alan Berube, November 9th 2021. Originally published on brookings.edu. https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2021/11/09/big-citiesarent-dividing-america-they-hold-the-key-to-our-collective-future/

Chapter 8   Cities in Control? Finding Solutions to Broad Issues   443

However, this zero-sum narrative not only hardens our divisions, it also misses the point. It’s our major metro areas that are at the forefront of global innovation and rapidly evolving social and economic dynamics. City and regional leaders’ ability to navigate these changes—including the common challenges and interdependencies they share with rural leaders—will dictate America’s collective future.

City Fortunes Have Changed Today’s focus on the urban/rural divide would have been hard to predict 25 years ago. In 1996, Brookings founded a new program on urban and metropolitan policy to make an affirmative case for cities when they were widely regarded as crisis points. Most were embroiled with issues like crime, poverty, and fiscal distress stemming from decades of federal policies that concentrated poverty in the urban core and opened the suburbs to white flight. As a case in point, our home city of Washington, D.C. was at the time governed by a congressionally-appointed control board, later chaired by our former Brookings colleague Alice Rivlin, which was charged with addressing structural budget deficits and public-sector mismanagement. Our first major report at Brookings, aided by the arrival of GIS mapping, depicted how the economic and social divides in the Greater Washington region did not fall neatly along city-suburban lines, but ran east-west, in which parts of the District of Columbia and suburban Maryland were saddled by poverty and disinvestment, hurting the whole region. When Mayor Anthony Williams regained control of the District’s finances in 2001, he embraced Rivlin’s audacious vision to reverse 50 years of population decline and grow the city by 100,000 residents in 10 years. While it eventually took 15 years, D.C. achieved that goal, and more. Today, the city faces a very different set of challenges than in 1996, as long-time residents struggle to afford housing and prosper from the region’s revival and increased high-tech status. Even more than 25 years ago, communities across the Greater Washington region share in those challenges.

Big Metro Areas are Windows into Our Future The fall and rise of Washington, D.C. offers a metaphor for the wider resurgence of metro areas, especially the largest ones, in the U.S. and global economy. Over the past quarter-century, those economies have heaped an increasing share of their rewards on highly educated workers and the urban industries in which they predominate. Together with the accelerating demographic and economic mixing between major U.S. cities and their suburbs, this means that

444  PART III    Crises and Ways Forward America’s future is shaped principally by its largest regions: 56 metropolitan areas with populations exceeding 1 million, from Fresno, Calif. to Greater New York, now account for more than half (57%) of the nation’s population, 60% of its jobs, and an astonishing 66% of its total economic output. Beyond their current demographic and economic heft, America’s largest city-regions also foreshadow the country’s future makeup. In 2000, residents of these metro areas were already 38% Latino or Hispanic or non-white (compared with 31% of U.S. population overall), presaging their 42% representation across the entire U.S. population in 2020. Today, more than half of very large metro residents are people of color, a little more than 20 years ahead of the U.S. Census Bureau’s projection for when our country will mark that milestone. A similar “future is now” dynamic characterizes large-metro economies, too. Digital, scientific, and professional services account for an outsized share of U.S. innovation, and more than one in three new U.S. jobs in the past 20 years. Today, these industries account for almost 9% of U.S. jobs, up from 7% in 2000. But in big metro areas, they were already 9% of jobs in 2000, and today represent 11% of employment, a harbinger for the continuing digitalization and knowledge-intensive growth of the U.S. economy in decades to come. Of course, our large cities and regions have always paved the way for American progress. From the nation’s founding in New York and Philadelphia, to the Industrial Revolution in New England’s mill cities, to World War II’s “arsenal of democracy” in Detroit and the cities of the Midwest, to the struggle for civil rights in Birmingham and the cities of the South, to the advent of the modern technological era in Silicon Valley and Seattle, our large cities and metro areas are the crucibles in which we continuously forge the America of tomorrow.

Metro Leadership is Essential for Tackling America’s Challenges Today, America depends more than ever on the relentless forward progress its big metro areas have historically delivered. Urgent challenges face U.S. families and communities: technological schisms that exclude too many workers from opportunity; a proliferation of low-wage jobs that destabilize families; systemic racism that continues to strip wealth and power from Black and other communities of color; and an unsustainable approach to building our neighborhoods, towns, cities, and regions that heightens economic and environmental risk and inequity. While these challenges are not specific to any one type of American community, our major metro areas will face them first. Indeed, that’s already happening, because leaders in these places—in government, business,

Chapter 8   Cities in Control? Finding Solutions to Broad Issues   445

nonprofits, universities, community groups—are on the front lines of those challenges. They are investing in more diverse tech talent pipelines, raising minimum wages and job quality standards, supporting more resilient and equitable infrastructure, and seeking to restore value to historically Black neighborhoods. Those holistic approaches take shape through crosssector alliances that bridge public and private interests, or downtown and neighborhood ones, often transcending partisan allegiances that stymie progress at the state and national levels. As these leaders do the work, they are also navigating rapid demographic changes that are upending traditional local power structures, ahead of similar trends that will increasingly transform a much wider swath of the American landscape. If we hope to sustain the American experiment across this turbulent era, our big metro areas will need to lead the way. But we can’t expect them to go it alone. The challenges they face are larger, more complex, and more demanding of coordinated action than those of the past. Metro leaders need better information about what works, and what doesn’t. They need opportunities to innovate new market-based tools and practices that simultaneously address multiple challenges. They need networks of support with their peers to problem-solve together, to combine their voices to advance wider reforms, and to further hone their leadership. Perhaps most of all, leaders in our major city-regions need greater authorities and assistance from their federal and state partners to meet their challenges at a metropolitan scale. Unprecedented flows of flexible federal dollars in the American Rescue Plan represent an important start; the new infrastructure bill and proposed social spending package promise additional, generational opportunities to encourage and enable bold new levels of problem-solving that traverse city, suburban, and even exurban boundaries. Democrats in California and Republicans in Indiana show that efforts to support metro success can transcend partisanship.

Metro Progress Can Narrow the Urban/Rural Divide Supporting metro leadership could also help address America’s widening geographic disparities. Our largest city-regions are prosperous in the aggregate, but they are not equally successful. In fact, the national agenda to help leftbehind places includes both urban and rural communities, which helps to explain the strong bipartisan interest it has garnered. Older industrial cities in the American heartland, like Birmingham, Cleveland, and St. Louis, are among those striving to reposition themselves by addressing racial segregation and fostering innovation, talent, and high-paying industries typically associated with their coastal counterparts.

446  PART III    Crises and Ways Forward Outside of the very largest metro areas, the differences between urban and rural communities are even more muted. According to economist Tim Bartik, the more than 500 chronically distressed local labor market areas around the country include a mix of metropolitan, smaller micropolitan, and rural communities that could benefit greatly from strategic federal support to recover from the pandemic recession. And just as not all cities and metro areas are prosperous, not all rural areas are poor. Nor are they a demographic monolith; people of color represent 24% of rural residents, and account for a majority of the population in an increasing number of rural counties. This blurring of urban and rural fortunes is analogous to the increasing similarities between cities and suburbs within metro areas. As our largest metro areas tackle America’s most complex challenges, they can bolster the fortunes of more than 300 other U.S. metro areas and a host of smaller cities, towns, and rural communities. Metro prosperity often makes rural prosperity possible, especially when place-based strategies strengthen broader regional supply chains, protect and preserve natural resources, and improve the hard and soft infrastructure that bridges the urban/rural divide. Our Brookings colleague Tony Pipa has urged an overdue rethink and renewal of federal rural policy toward this end. One of us has argued for modernizing federal place-based regional economic development policies to revitalize distressed urban and rural economies, including building the capacity of local leaders to mount successful strategies. Along those lines, we can do much more to share knowledge and talent across communities of different sizes, enabling local leaders to adopt and adapt smart innovations regardless of their urban, suburban, or rural provenance.

28 If Mayors Ruled the World: Why They Should and How they Already Do Benjamin R. Barber § City of Ships! City of the world! (for all races are here, All the lands of the earth make contributions here;) City of wharves and stores—city of tall facades of marble and iron! § ‘Chapter 1. If Mayors Ruled the World’, If Mayors Ruled the World: Dysfunctional Nations, Rising Cities, Benjamin R. Barber, pp. 3-24, 2013, Yale University Press.

Chapter 8   Cities in Control? Finding Solutions to Broad Issues   447

Proud and passionate city—mettlesome, mad, extravagant city! Spring up O city! Walt Whitman, “City of Ships” In a teeming world of too much difference and too little solidarity, democracy is in deep crisis. With obstreperous nation-states that once rescued democracy from problems of scale now thwarting democracy’s globalization, it is time to ask in earnest, “Can cities save the world?”1 I believe they can. […] We have come full circle in the city’s epic history. Humankind began its march to politics and civilization in the polis-the township. It was democracy’s. original incubator. But for millennia, we relied on monarchy and empire and then on newly invented nation-states to bear the civilizational burden and the democratic load. Today, after a long history of regional success, the nation-state is failing us on the global scale. It was the perfect political recipe for the liberty and independence of autonomous peoples and nations. It is utterly unsuited to interdependence. The city, always the human habitat of first resort, has in today’s globalizing world once again become democracy’s best hope. Urbanity may or may not be our nature, but it is our history, and for better or worse, by chance or by design, it defines how we live, work, play, and associate. Whatever large-scale political arrangements we fashion, politics starts in the neighborhood and the town. More than half the world’s people now live in cities—more than 78 percent of the developing world. As it was our origin, the city now appears to be our destiny. It is where creativity is unleashed, community solidified, and citizenship realized. If we are to be rescued, the city rather than the nation-state must be the agent of change. Given the state’s resistance to cross-border collaboration, our foremost political challenge today is to discover or establish alternative institutions capable of addressing the multiplying problems of an interdependent world without surrendering the democracy that nation-states traditionally have secured. In order to save ourselves from both anarchic forms of globalization, such as war and terrorism, and monopolistic forms, such as multinational corporations, we need global democratic bodies that work, bodies capable of addressing the global challenges we confront in an ever more interdependent world. In the centuries of conflict that have defined the world from the Congress of Vienna to the defeat of the Axis Powers and the writing of a Universal Declaration of Human Rights, from the Treaty of Versailles to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of a bipolar world, nation-states have made little progress toward global governance. Too inclined by their nature to rivalry and mutual exclusion, they seem quintessentially indisposed to cooperation and incapable of establishing global common goods. Moreover, democracy is locked in their tight embrace, and there seems little chance either for democratizing globalization or for globalizing democracy as long as its flourishing depends on rival sovereign nations. What then is to be done?

448  PART III    Crises and Ways Forward The solution stands before us, obvious but largely uncharted: let cities, the most networked and interconnected of our political associations, defined above all by collaboration and pragmatism, by creativity and multiculture, do what states cannot. Let mayors rule the world. Since, as Edward Glaeser writes, “the strength that comes from human collaboration is the central truth behind civilization’s success and the primary reason why cities exist,” then surely cities can and should govern globally.2 In fact, it is already happening. Cities are increasingly networked into webs of culture, commerce, and communication that encircle the globe. These networks and the cooperative complexes they embody can be helped to do formally what they now do informally: govern through voluntary cooperation and shared consensus. If mayors ruled the world, the more than 3.5 billion people (over half of the world’s population) who are urban dwellers and the many more in the exurban neighborhoods beyond could participate locally and cooperate globally at the same time—a miracle of civic “glocality” promising pragmatism instead of politics, innovation rather than ideology, and solutions in place ofsovereignty.3 The challenge of democracy in the modern world has been how to join participation, which is local, with power, which is central. The nation-state once did the job, but recently it has become too large to allow meaningful participation even as it remains too small to address centralized global power. Cosmopolitanism responds by imagining citizens—literally city dwellers— who are rooted in urban neighborhoods where participation and community are still possible, reaching across frontiers to confront and contain central power. It imagines them joining one another to oversee and regulate anarchic globalization and the illegitimate forces it unleashes. Eighty-five years ago, John Dewey embarked on a “search for the great community,” a community that might tie people together through common activities and powerful symbols into an expansive public organized around communication.4 In doing so, Dewey delinked democracy from mere government and the state and insisted it be understood as a deep form of association embracing the family, the school, industry, and religion. He was certain that when it is embraced “as a life of free and enriching communion,” democracy will come into its own, but only when “free social inquiry is indissolubly wedded to the art of full and moving communication.”5 A world governed by cities gives democratic form to Dewey’s aspirational vision of a great community. It does not require that a new global governing edifice be artificially constructed ex nihilo, and it does not mean that networked cities must be certified by the nation-states they will supersede. It places the emphasis…on bottom-up citizenship, civil society, and voluntary community across borders rather than on top-down prescriptions and· executive mandates emanating from unitary global rulers. New York’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg may seem hubristic, yet his rhetoric-hardly Dewey’s, but

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rooted in realism-resonates with the power of municipal localism played out in an interdependent world: “I have my own army in the NYPD,” Bloomberg says; “my own State Department, much to Foggy Bottom’s annoyance.” New York has “every kind of people from every part of the world and every kind of problem.” And if Washington doesn’t like it? “Well,” Bloomberg allows, “I don’t listen to Washington very much.”6 It is not boasting but both the burdens and the possibilities of the city that give Mayor Bloomberg’s claims resonance. For, as he insists, “the difference between my level of government and other levels of government is that action takes place at the city level.” While American government right now is “just unable to do anything … the mayors of this country still have to deal with the real world.” Presidents pontificate principle; mayors pick up the garbage. And campaign for gun control (as with the Bloomberg-inspired NGO Mayors Against Illegal Guns). And work to combat global warming (the C40 Cities). This can-do thinking is echoed in organizations such as ICLEI (Local Governments for Sustainability), whose report following the no-can-do U.N. Climate Summit in Durban at the end of 2orr observed that “local government is where the rubber hits the road when it comes to responding to the human impacts of climate change.”7 The cities’ approach to climate change emerged a year earlier, when 207 cities signed the Mexico City Pact at the World Mayors Summit on Climate in Mexico City, even as states were busily doing nothing much at all other than vaguely pledging to honor “strategies and actions aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions.” By expanding and diversifying the networks through which they are already cooperating, cities are proving they can do things together that states cannot. What would the parliament of mayors I will advocate…be but the formalization of voluntary global networks already in existence? The 2010 World Congress of the meta-network called the United Cities and Local Governments, with 3,000 delegates from 100 countries, is already halfway there! What is a prospective global civil religion but the common civic expression of how people actually live in cities? The spirit that enables migrant workers, whether taxi drivers or accountants, to roam from city to city looking for work without ever really leaving town? Cities come in varieties of every kind, but they also resemble one another functionally and infrastructurally. The new City Protocol network suggests best practices that exploit such commonalities by offering a “progressive working framework for cities worldwide to assess and improve performance in environmental sustainability, economic competitiveness, quality of life, and city services, by innovating and demonstrating new leadership models, new ways of engaging society, and by leveraging new information and communication technologies.”8 How many ways are there to stuff a million people into a radically delimited space? Even in the eighteenth century, Jean-Jacques Rousseau noticed that “all capital cities are just alike…. Paris and London seem to me

450  PART III    Crises and Ways Forward to be the same town.”9 Are Sao Paulo, Tokyo, and New York that different today? The cross-border civil society we envision is simply the global network of partnerships and associations already sharing common civic values, of communities organized around the struggle for universal human rights, of religious associations with an ecumenical outlook, of international societies of artists and social networks of friends real and virtual alike spiraling outward to encompass strangers. Such a network is not waiting to be born but is already half-grown, waiting rather to be recognized, exploited, and formalized. These synapses that link urban nodes are already marking new pathways to interdependence. Novel mechanisms of cooperation and common decision making are allowing cities to address, in common, issues of weapons, trade, climate change, cultural exchange, crime, drugs, transportation, public health; immigration, and technology. They need not always be formal: Rey Colon, a Chicago alderman, “first saw how well [bike-share] innovations work on a trip to Seville, Spain.”10 Mayor Rahm Emanuel subsequently made a campaign promise to lay out one hundred miles of “green” protected bike lanes on major Chicago thoroughfares and is currently making good on the promise. New York City’s bike-share program opened in mid-2013. Sharing green ideas among cities and cooperating on slowing climate change in city networks like the C40 with bike-share and pedestrian mall programs are not quite the same thing as ruling the world, but they do indicate that cities are far ahead of states in confronting the daunting challenges of interdependence, if only through voluntary and informal cooperation. Networked cities already supplement the brave but endangered experiment of the European Community in pooling sovereignty in vital ways likely to. survive a fracturing of the Eurozone. Long-time (and now former) Mayor Wolfgang Schuster of Stuttgart is a European statesman and civic organizer, but first of all he is a municipal democrat attuned to how local democracy is enhanced by inter-city collaboration. “We are not an island,” he insists; “we need a strong lobby for strong local self-government systems. But cities themselves are not islands, so we have to work in networks to make understandable what are our needs, what are our demands [by]…learning from each other.”11 It is in this grounded and practical fashion that cities may in time, with their own adroit associations, supplant the awkward dance of European nations in hock to their banks and thus to the machinations of the G-9 or G-20. How? I will propose a parliament of mayors that will need to ask no state’s permission to assemble, seek consensual solutions to common problems, and voluntarily comply with common policies of their own choosing. When mayors like New York’s Michael Bloomberg institute measures to end smoking or control childhood obesity by curbing large-container soda sales, Washington can only look on in wonder—deprecating or admiring the

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initiatives but impotent in the face of mayors elsewhere in the world who might choose to do the same. (Of course, courts can intervene, as they did in overturning Bloomberg’s soda ban.) Neither soda nor tobacco companies, influential with national governments through their hubristic lobbies and seductive bank accounts, can do much more than whine in advertising campaigns about the lost freedom to kill yourself (or your children). This is not to say that states are powerless in controlling, even strangling, cities trying to circumvent them. Legislative sovereignty and budget authority give states plenty of ways to block run-away towns. The only global city that coexists friction-free with its state is Singapore, where city and state are one. Yet a surprisingly large arena of municipal activity and cross-border cooperation remains available to determined cities. The call to let mayors become global governors and enable their urban constituents to reach across frontiers and become citizens without borders does not then reflect a utopian aspiration. It is more than the longing for an impossible regime of global justice. It asks only that we recognize a world already in the making, one coming into being without systematic planning or the blessing of any state-based authority; that we take advantage of the unique urban potential for cooperation and egalitarianism unhindered by those obdurate forces of sovereignty and nationality, of ideology and inequality, that have historically hobbled and isolated nation-states inside fortresses celebrated as being “independent” and “autonomous.” Nor need the mayors tie their aspirations to cooperation to the siren song of a putative United Nations that will never be united because it is composed of rival nations whose essence lies in their sovereignty and independence. If mayors are to rule the world, however, it is clear they will have to pay dues to prime ministers and presidents. Cities may already constitute networks of collaboration that influence the global economy and bypass the rules and regulations of states, but they lie within the jurisdiction and sovereignty of superior political bodies. Mayor Bloomberg may have his own army, but let him try to deploy it in Cuba or Washington, D.C., or Albany—or even across the river in Hoboken or up in Yonkers, a few miles north of Manhattan. He can route bikes through Manhattan, but try doing it on the New York Thruway or elsewhere along President Eisenhower’s Interstate Highway System. Governance is about power as well as problems, jurisdiction as well as function so the relationship of cities to states is of critical concern here. There are two crucial questions: Are the interests of cities and of the states to which cities belong in harmony or in conflict? And can cities do what they do in the face of national governments that are not merely indifferent but hostile to their global aspirations? The answers to both questions are complex and raise questions of legal and political jurisdiction… But what is clear from the outset is that the interests of cities and of the nations to which they belong (and belong is

452  PART III    Crises and Ways Forward the right word!) are often necessarily in tension. However networked and interdependent cities may become in terms of their economic, technocratic, and cultural functions, they live under the law and in the shadow of the legal jurisdiction and executive and fiscal authority of states that are still very powerful states. States that are not going anywhere. If, as Saskia Sassen has suggested, “what contributes to growth in the network of global cities may well not contribute to growth in nations,”12 and if the growth of global cities is correlated with deficits for national governments, governments are unlikely to sit back and do nothing while their suzerainty is eroded. In the 1970s, in a funny and futile campaign to become mayor of New York, the author Norman Mailer floated the nutty idea of detaching the city from New York State and perhaps the United States of America, endowing it with independence.13 Some will see the notion of cities becoming sufficiently independent from states to rule the world as equally nutty. Surely states will fight to regain control of globalizing cities that contemplate crossborder actions, demonstrating forcefully that however collaborative and trans-territorial cities may regard themselves, they remain creatures of state power and subsidiaries of national sovereignty. Unlike corporations or associations, states are territorial by definition, and cities always sit on land that is part of some nation’s territory. New York may not pay much attention to Washington, but Washington will be watching New York. While citizens can dream across borders, they are defined by and owe their fealty neither to the local city alone, nor to some emerging global civic cosmopolis, but to their national flags and patriotic anthems and defining national “missions.” For Mayor Bloomberg and his proud New Yorkers-count me among them-this means we must hearken not just to “New York, New York, it’s a wonderful town” and the Statue of Liberty, but to “America the Beautiful” and the Lincoln Memorial; to that larger nation that claims to be a “beacon of liberty” to the world. In France, it reminds intellectuals in the 5th Arrondissement that la mission civilisatrice is French, not Parisian; and in Germany, it warns that Deutschland Über Alles is not just a signifier of vanished imperial hauteur or fascist hubris but also of the sovereignty of Germany over Frankfurt and Berlin. Texas may sometimes imagine itself severing the ties that bind it to the United States, and Austin might imagine itself an independent liberal oasis in the Texas desert, but neither Dallas nor Austin is about to declare independence from Texas or the United States. The interdependence of cities may erode their ties to nation-states and draw them toward collaboration with one another, but no state worth its salt, as measured by its sovereignty, will stand still and watch cities annul subsidiarity and escape the gravitational pull of their sovereign mother ship. That is true even in Singapore, a city-state where paradoxically a city must coexist with a territorially coterminous state that exercises sovereignty

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over itself as city and state. Moreover, national communities are important markers of identity and help establish the greater communities rooted in common history, common language, and a common narrative (say a civil religion) that allow urban residents to share citizenship beyond town limits. To suggest a tension between urban identity and national identity is not then to favor one or the other; it is just to state a fact that affects our argument here. This tension shows that to make the case for cities as building blocks of global governance requires a systematic and sustained argument that takes into account the power and jurisdiction of states and the intractability of territorial frontiers as well as the nature of cities. The task requires that we examine the history and essential nature of cities; that we demonstrate and elaborate their pragmatic, problem-solving character; and that we show how their role as global governance building blocks can be reinforced and solidified in the face of potentially belligerent nation-state opposition by sovereign entities that nonetheless play a vital role in civic and community life. The success of cities must supplement the efforts of states and offset sovereign incapacities without pretending nations away or making them villains in the story of democratic globalization. For as we will see, the dysfunction of nation-states as global cooperators arises at least in part out of their virtues—their independence, sovereignty, and commitments to national equality and liberty. The argument offered here also requires that we survey, understand, and build upon the successes of lesser known but robust civic entities and networks such as the United Cities and Local Governments, International Union of Local Authorities, Metropolis (the World Association of the Major Metropolises), the American League of Cities, ICLEI, the C40 Cities (focused on addressing climate change), the New Hanseatic League, the European Union’s Secretariat of Cities, the U.S. Mayors Climate Protection Agreement, the Association of (U.S.) Mayors Against Illegal Guns, the Megacities Foundation, CityNet, and City Protocol- among many others. These clumsily named and seemingly dull bureaucratic constructions are in fact birthing an exciting new cosmopolis whose activities and ambitions hold the secret to fashioning the global processes and institutions that states have failed to create. Many of these networks were created by or contributed to by a few global leaders such as Stuttgart’s Wolfgang Schuster, Barcelona’s Xavier Trias, and New York City’s hyperactive Michael Bloomberg. With or without authoritative underwriting, networked cities and megacities are likely to determine whether democracy-perhaps even civilization itself-survives in the coming decades, when the -primary challenge will remain how to overcome the violent conflict within and between states, and how to address the cataclysmic economic and ecological anarchy and the inequalities and injustices that the absence of democratic global governance

454  PART III    Crises and Ways Forward occasions. We are already stumbling into that seductive but deadly anarchy in which pandemics and ecological catastrophes are allowed to flourish in sovereignty’s name: “Not at the expense of my sovereignty will you monitor my air quality (or inspect my weapons production or regulate my fracking methods)!” And we are already living in an era of global private monopolies in money and influence that are empowered under the banner of liberty and markets that are anything but free. What is missing is not globalization, but globalization that is public rather than private, democratic not hegemonic, egalitarian rather than monopolistic. In struggling against this global anarchy and the brute force, winner-take-all mentality it facilitates, cities working across borders make a difference. By working voluntarily and cooperatively to pursue sustainability, justice, and democratic equality locally, they can mitigate the depredations of fractious states and temper-even regulate-the global markets that states have been unable or unwilling to control. Cities woven into an informal cosmopolis can become, as the polis once was, new incubators of democracy, this time on a global scale. While it is true that historically and in most places cities have been subordinated not just to inequality and corruption but to the politics of kingship and empire, their tendencies have generally remained anti-ideological and in a practical sense democratic. Their politics are persuasive rather than peremptory, and their governors are neighbors exercising responsibility rather than remote rulers wielding brute force. Under siege from imperial marauders in an earlier millennium, cities nevertheless had to persist in overseeing the necessities of everyday life. Cities are habitats for common life. They are where people live and hence where they learn and love, work and sleep, pray and play, grow and eat, and finally die. Even with armies at the gates or plagues in the streets, city dwellers occupy themselves with the diurnal-and sometimes also the sublime. Their paramount aims and thus the aims of the mayors they elect to serve them are mundane, even parochial: collecting garbage and collecting art rather than collecting votes or collecting allies; putting up buildings and running buses rather than putting up flags and running political parties; securing the flow of water rather than the flow of arms; fostering education and culture in place of national defense and patriotism. They are at pains to promote collaboration, not exceptionalism; to succor a knowing sense of participation and pride in community rather than to institutionalize blind patriotism. Cities have little choice: to. survive and flourish they must remain hospitable to pragmatism and problem solving, to cooperation and networking, to creativity and innovation. Come hell or high water, war or siege, they have to worry about plowing the streets and providing parking and yes, always and everywhere, picking up the garbage. Indeed, […] in many developingworld megacities, picking up the garbage has become a key to the informal economy and to the employment of the poor. The city’s defining association

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with garbage, as well as with trade, business, transportation, communication, digital technology, and culture—with creativity and imagination—is a natural feature of human proximity and population density. As Richard Florida has written, “the real key to unleashing our creativity lies in humanity’s greatest invention- the city. Cities are veritable magnetrons for creativity.”14 Creativity and imagination drive invention, commerce, and culture, but they also are engines of democracy. To consider the future of the city as a foundation for democratic global governance also means looking to the city’s past and its ancient democratic origins. Born in the self-governing and autonomous polis, democracy realizes its global telos in the self-governing and interdependent cosmopolis. The circle completes itself. At the end of the beginning of human civilization the city appears. As men and women produce language, culture, and economy, they gather into communities. As Aristotle once called man a political animal (a zoon politikon), Edward Glaeser today speaks of human kind as an “urban species,” whose cities ire “made of flesh, not concrete.”15 The Greeks gave the name polis to their early communities, which in the case of archetypical Athens was a politicized collection of tribes (so-called demes). As in most early towns, the Athenian polis was literally a city of men, though it flaunted its blinkered “egalitarianism.” Citizens were native-born males only, while women (and slaves and foreigners) were relegated to subordinate roles and inferior identities. But though the polis began as little more than a village with a yen to sprawl and a site for vibrant but highly restricted civic participation, it still functioned as democracy’s local incubator—a first experiment in tribes of men freeing themselves from tribal headmen, monarchs, and emperors to secure a rudimentary form of self-government. These minuscule townships with perhaps 20,000 citizens could, however, hardly be called cities. Moreover, tribalism and strongman governance remained the rule for most other villages and small towns around the ancient world. Yet the polis was born to grow, and grow it did from polis to town, and town to fortified market; from rural market center to expansive trading crossroads, increasingly outgrowing the walls that protected it against invaders as it reached out to a smaller world ever more connected by highways and rivers, trading routes, and navigable seas. Nearly 90 percent of the world’s population lives on or near oceans and seas and the rivers flowing into themwaterways that invite mobility and communication but whose tides, storms, and floods also invite disaster. Even in the West in the pre-Christian era, the Mediterranean had become a watery crossroads around which networked towns and ports constituted themselves as an interdependent regional market. In China’s three kingdoms too, and in Japan and on the Indian subcontinent, cities grew along the great rivers and on proto-port coastal towns. The process was unremitting. Over millennia, with pauses and setbacks, cities grew into capital cities and imperial cities, hosting hundreds of thousands and millions

456  PART III    Crises and Ways Forward rather than thousands of people. The movement was, in Max Weber’s early characterization, “from simple to complex, from general to specialized.”16 The world rushed toward what looked like ineluctable urbanity. This surging history of urbanization and industrialization notwithstanding, however, as recently as 1958 Edward C. Banfield could write with confidence that “most of the people of the world live and die without ever achieving membership in a community larger than the family or a tribe and that outside of Europe and America the concerting of behavior in political associations and corporate organizations is a rare and recent thing.”17 No more. In the half century since the eminent sociologist wrote, the city has taken still another leap forward: capital cities underwritten by megarhetoric have been morphing into networked megacities of tens of millions, intersecting with other cities to comprise today’s burgeoning megalopolises and megaregions in which an increasing majority of the earth’s population now dwells. Tribes still dominate certain cultures, but even in Africa megacity conurbations have emerged, representing territorially immense urban juggernauts that encompass populations of twenty million or more. Typical is Africa’s LagosIbadan-Cotonou region, where Lagos alone is projected to reach twenty-five million by 2025, making it the world’s third-largest city after Mumbai and Tokyo, in a Nigeria that has six cities over a million and another dozen with 500,000 to a million-all of them growing rapidly.18 Then there is Kinshasa-Brazzaville, two interconnected cities separated by a river in rival “Congo” states. Other megacities have appeared in the Indo-Gangetic Plain, in China’s Pearl River Delta, as well as in the Northeast Corridor in the United States, Japan’s Taiheiyo Belt, Europe’s Golden Banana (sunbelt) along the western Mediterranean, and the Greater Sao Paulo metro region in Brazil. China’s cities are growing so fast that it is nearly impossible to keep up. A McKinsey study estimates that in the next ten to fifteen years, 136 new cities will join the world’s 600 cities with the largest GDPs, all of them from the developing world. By 2025, 100 of the top 600 GDP cities will be Chinese.19 The concentration of urban populations into ever more complex systems, at once denser and more expansive, continues to accelerate. Nor is the compass of these conglomerations exclusively territorial. In her study of New York, London, and Tokyo, Saskia Sassen argues that as they become service centers for the new global economy, “in many regards…[these three cities] function as one trans-territorial marketplace.” They serve not just one by one but “function as a triad,” representing a new form of metropolis that is neither territorial nor virtual, but a network composed of the intersecting and overlapping “global city” functions.20 There are weird new hybrids as well, new corporate “instant cities” like New Songdo City in South Korea, planned to open in 2 or 5 with a population of 250,000, or a proposed city of 500,000 residents to be called Lazika on a wetland site on the Black Sea

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in Georgia that would become Georgia’s second-largest city after its capital, Tbilisi (though not-withstanding construction of its first Public Service Hall, the project is in doubt following the electoral defeat of its advocate, President Mikheil Saakashvili, in 2012). Then there are such random and anarchic counterpoints as the unplanned refugee camps-cum-cities like Dadaab in Kenya, which may have up to 290,000 people jammed in to a “temporary encampment” served by mobile courts, traveling counseling services, and sometime youth education centers. There are also those imagined worlds favored by web-addicted dreamers, “seaworlds” to be set adrift in the ocean. One of these has already been legally founded as Seastead and, according to the Seastead Institute (www. seasteading.org), is to be launched “within the decade” in the Pacific Ocean, off California; and parallel “skyworlds” untethered from the land (and from reason?), conceived as future sanctuaries-urban colonies-for people for whom the planet’s continents have grown too small. That such daydreams are more than just fantasy is evident from the plans of futurist entrepreneurs such as Richard Branson of Virgin Air fame, who hopes to service such colonies with novel companies like his Virgin Galactic, which is reportedly preparing to offer space miles benefits to its customers. Even old-line politicians such as Newt Gingrich now talk about colonizing the moon as staples of their political campaign patter. For some time, idealists and dreamers have looked even further-beyond our known urban behemoths and linked megacities-in search of Marshall McLuhan’s global village, a mote in his prescient eye sixty years ago, but today an abstraction being realized not only in digital and virtual forms like the cloud, but in global economic markets and in the complex urban networks that are our focus here. Global village indeed! The urban philosopher Constantinos Doxiadis, pursuing his own science of human development he calls Ekistics, has predicted the emergence of a single planetary cityEcumenopolis.21 Doxiadis gives a sociological and futurist spin to science fiction writers like Isaac Asimov and William Gibson who for decades have been imagining urban agglomerations on a planetary scale.22 Just beyond the global village, pushing out from the imagined Ecumenopolis, one can catch a glimpse of Gaia, that mythic organic entity that, in the hypothesis posited by James Lovelock, is as an evolving and self-regulating system in which biosphere, atmosphere, hydrosphere, and pedosphere all work together on behalf of a sustainable and integral planet, though whether it is urban or not, or even includes humanity, .te1nacns a puzzle. In Gaia, Lovelock hypothesizes, “we may find ourselves and all other living things to be parts and partners of a vast being who in her entirety has the power to maintain our planet as a fit and comfortable habitat for life.”23 This is cosmopolitanism on interstellar stilts hinting at a new phase of interconnectivity mimicking the galactic empires of Star Trek and Star

458  PART III    Crises and Ways Forward Wars. Yet there it is in the Mars surface explorer Curiosity probing science fiction’s favorite planet for signs of life (and finding them!); and in the American government’s wackily inspired plan to offer grants to private sector companies hoping to launch manned expeditions to nearby stars like Alpha Centauri. Such hyper-cosmopolitan visions may be pure fantasy, although NASA’s “earth system science” takes them seriously, and they are urban only in a vague sense of universal integration Lovelock credits the novelist William Golding with the term Gaia, but the Gaia approach seems to incorporate both the longing for and expectation of an interdependent urbanity as encompassing as humanity’s perfervid imagination. This journey from polis to megalopolis, from parochial pieces to imagined whole, has been a grand voyage from the simple to the complex, the rural to the urban, the local to the global, the mundane to the imaginative and the fantastic. The development, although inspired, has had a feel of pedestrian ineluctability about it, with our real-world population ever more concentrated, commerce ever more global, and complexity continuingly augmented. As if history is shaping a world concretely that we once imagined only in our dreams. For dreams are now being given palpable form by planners and architects. The last several years have witnessed three global architectural contests by the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia (IAAC), the most recent of which drew over one hundred fantastical but realitybased proposals “envisioning the habitat of the future” under the title SelfSufficient City.24 Among the design ideas: the Weightlessness City, Sky-City, Bio-Digital City, Ecotopia, MegaCityBlock, Non-Stop City, Repower City, Hole City, Drift City, Swarm City, and Freedom in Captivity. Inevitable or not, and whether or not we like it (many do not), the developments depicted here, with which the architects of the Self-Sufficient City Contest are grappling, have resulted in and are the products of the forging of civic, cultural, and commercial networks that have made human association in the form of urbanity the touchstone for a sustainable human civilization. Without exceeding the limits of what is actually in process today-leave aside fantasies of Ecumenopolis and Gaia and interstellar migrations of cities—a realistic road to cosmopolis and a world governed by mayors lies before us. It is left to us only to determine-whether we wish to take it, and in doing so, take democracy to planetary scale. For all the contradictions and obstacles presented by cities, they remain a formidable alternative to the conventional nation-state paradigm in which our thinking has been imprisoned for the past three centuries. The very term inter-national assumes that nation-states must be the starting place for inter-relational thinking. Global organizations inscribe the prejudice in their defining nomenclature: the old “concert of nations,” and of course the League of Nations and the United Nations. This road has led nowhere slowly. Are we any closer today to a semblance of global governance than when Hugo

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Grotius and Thomas Hobbes tried to imagine a contract among nations or when Immanuel Kant penned his perpetually unrealized Perpetual Peace? Closer than we were at the Congress of Vienna or, following the war to end all wars, the Treaty of Versailles? We seek an alternative road forward not for academic reasons (although the teaching of the field atavistically labeled “international affairs” could use a major overhaul starting with its name), but because in this fiercely interdependent world the demand for global governance has become the critical challenge of our times. The planet itself pleads its case. The seas are rising, the glaciers melting, and the atmosphere warming. But the 193 nations that have gathered annually in Copenhagen, Mexico City, Durban, and Rio remain implacable and immovable. Too busy explaining why their sovereignty and their pursuit of independence for their stubbornly proud peoples justify taking no action, they must make themselves oblivious to imperiled shorelines, to aquifers and watersheds used up, atmospheric co2 passing the tipping point of 350 ppm seen by many scientists as an upper limit on carbon emissions and now above 400 ppm, and global temperature already exceeding the rise of two degrees centigrade that scientists only recently set as a limit. Little island nations like the Maldives may vanish and the economies of the great nations may be devastated, but the nation-state seems intent on going down in complacent oblivion with its antique and eroded but ever prized sovereignty intact. “USA! USA!” chant the American crowds at ballgames and political rallies, embracing a proud but lumbering behemoth bereft of capacity to safeguard them from the brutal interdependent world at their doorstep. Much the same obliviousness affects our attitudes toward poverty. Rich nations find ways to grow richer and the poor grow poorer, but it is as much sovereignty as greed that fuels the dismaying inequalities between North and South and compounds the problems of combating disease, famine, and genocide. The defect is political as well as economic. The 99 percent watch the one percent dominate the global economy, while the bottom half sinks into abject poverty, wondering why the middle class alone attracts the attention of “democratic” rulers. For not only has the middle class in the developing world watched its status put at risk by a system geared to the wealthiest, but the new emerging middle class in nations like India, Thailand, and Indonesia has seemingly turned its back on the poorer classes from which it only recently managed to detach itself. The global recession also fails to arouse our attention. Mortgage holders default, businesses go under, secondary markets collapse, and banks fail. Yet the causes are more closely associated with democratic than fiscal defects, above all an absence of global trust and transnational civic capital. Banking depends on trust, and banks are most successful when they are integral to the communities they serve. During the recent meltdown, small community

460  PART III    Crises and Ways Forward banks and cooperatives were largely immune to the disasters that befell their huge global brethren. The sentimental story told in the classic film It’s a Wonderful Life, in which the small-time community banker played by Jimmy Stewart prevails over the ambitious big-bank rival who tries to destroy him, contains a nugget of truth about the relationship between banking and a democratic community. Embedded in these critical economic issues is a tension between old theories and new realities. The new realities are about interdependence. For decades thinkers such as Masao Miyoshi have been announcing the coming of a “borderless world.”25 But the old theory insists on the sovereign independence of bordered states that, lacking a global compass, allow banks and oil cartels (and pandemics and climate change) to dominate the world. The institutions that precipitate today’s crises are cross-border, but the states tasked to address the crises remain trapped within their frontiers. So as futurists and pessimists alike pontificate about a world without borders-a world defined by inventive technologies, unremitting terrorism, liberated markets, uncontrollable labor migration, asymmetrical war, novel diseases, and weapons of mass destruction-complacent sovereigntists and stout “new nationalists,” along with their conservative patriot allies, rattle on about the sanctity of frontiers and the autonomy of nation-states. Unwitting idealists all (though they still believe they are realists), they imagine an expiring world in which sovereign states still fashion unilateral solutions to global problems. They fail to notice that traditional democratic politics, caught in the comfortable box of sovereignty, has become irrelevant to new transnational realities that undemocratic bodies like banks and multinational corporations are enthusiastically addressing in their stead. Tethered to independence, and the social contract theory that gave it birth centuries ago, democracy is under duress, challenged once again by the problem of scale that undermined the early polis, but this time on a global scale-unable to rise to the fateful challenges of a world defined by forces of interdependence. Democracy was born under radically different circumstances. First cultivated in the ancient world in the face-to-face participatory township, it managed when challenged by the growing scale of early modern societies to re-imagine itself successfully as the representative nation-state. But today it must adapt to a global, networked, interdependent world, or likely wither. To survive actually, it must find ways to establish itself virtually. To preserve its local vitality, it must achieve a global compass. It can no longer protect itself inside its borders, or protect the borders that define it, unless it can cross those borders as easily as the stealth insurgent intent on mayhem or the undocumented worker desperate for a job. Democracy must be as infectious as the latest pandemic, as fast moving as the wily currency speculator, and as viral as the World Wide Web.

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States will not govern globally. Cities can and will-though not by writing a global charter of cities like the Charter of the United Nations, nor by promulgating a new Declaration of Human Rights. We already understand rights and have codified them in the modern era from sunup to sundown. We understand what rights ask of us. We lack only global democratic mechanisms by which they can be enacted and enforced across borders. Without civic foundations to give mechanisms of enforcement weight, rights are (as James Madison once said of the U.S. Bill of Rights) just paper, parchment barriers offering little real protection against abuse. What we require are ways to act informally and piecemeal across borders that give substance to declarations of human rights, to realize the noble goals about which the Disunited Nations have mostly rhapsodized. States still set the terms, but cities bear the consequences. To take a poignant example, if terrorists manage to detonate a dirty bomb imported on a container ship, it may be nation-states like the “great Satan” United States of America they mean to punish, but it will be cities like Los Angeles and New York that suffer the carnage. Boston is only the latest American city to have experienced the consequences of a terrorist’s global rage. Cities cannot wait for states to figure out the meaning of interdependence. As David Wylie has observed, to “redress the disconnect,” cities and. towns will themselves have to begin to “elect representatives to make common cause with other threatened urban populations.”26 Yet there is little chance we can jump ahead and constitute a formal world government that like the nation-state is unitary, authoritative, and top-down-and somehow also still remains democratic. Nor is there a need to do so. Wylie wisely notes that “a secure world must be invented piecemeal, in multiple nations. It cannot be imagined or implemented as a unitary, preconceived plan or program.”27 Piecemeal describes what is actually taking place, with results that are real if less than dramatic. Informal governance achieved is better than formal government unrealized. A parliament of mayors that deliberates and undertakes to do whatever cities are willing voluntarily to do under the purview of states still able to constrain them is better than a world altogether without common aims or shared policies, a world in which international organizations try to represent the interests of a human family that actually is without an effective global advocate. A global league of cities is, to be sure, not the same thing as a global central government. But this is probably a virtue, since it means that a league of cities will be able to act glocally through persuasion and example, and allow citizens to participate in their neighborhoods and local urban communities even as their mayors engage informally with one another across the globe. Moreover, networked cities already comprise webs of influence and interactivity that are creating new forms of global social capital and global civil society, and are birthing something resembling a global “civil

462  PART III    Crises and Ways Forward religion” whose reality is interdependence, whose liturgy is rights, whose doctrine is cooperation, and whose practice is democracy. These networks do not extinguish or override the essence of cities but exploit and generalize them. Glocality strengthens local citizenship and then piggybacks global citizenship on it. The hog trained to carry a scrawny lad learns how to bear heavyweights. Cities will not face the impossible task that states face: trying to figure out how to yield their abstract sovereign essence to secure their concrete political survival. Cities have no sovereignty. They will not have to figure out how to overstep the bounds of their jurisdictional authority and cross sacred territorial borders. Borders do not define them. In the ancient world, cities gave birth to creativity, imagination, and thus civilization; in time they found their way to democracy. Increases of scale broke the spirit of the ancient city and turned it into a parochial enemy of progress. But scale today imperils the states that once saved cities from scale, and the moment has come for cities, now incarnated in the emerging global metropolis, to rescue democracy again. The challenge is practical but also theoretical. The central issue is how the social contract on which modern nation-states depend can be globalized without being de-democratized, and how an institution capable of global governance can be found to succeed the nation-state. The city is a living organism, but it is also a crucial construct, one that permits us to restate the social contract in global terms. For these reasons, I approach the task portrayed here as a political pragmatist but also as a political philosopher. It is only in reading Aristotle, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Rousseau, and Dewey that we can understand the task faced by Athens, Rome, London, Paris, and New York. For these cities must learn to succeed Greece, Italy, England, France, and the United States and a hundred other nations like them in reinventing governance for the twenty-first century. Full circle then: can cities save the world? That may be too daunting a challenge. But it seems possible that they can rescue democracy from sovereignty and find ways to help us govern our world democratically and bottom-up, if only informally; ways to help us solve problems pragmatically rather than ideologically. Former president Bill Clinton reminded the 2012 Democratic National Convention that “when times are tough and people are frustrated and angry and hurting and uncertain, the politics of constant conflict may be good. But what is good politics does not necessarily work in the real world. What works in the real world is cooperation.” Then he looked into the very heart of the city, and to cheers and applause, urged his audience to “ask the mayors who are here. Los Angeles is getting green and Chicago is getting an infrastructure bank because Republicans and Democrats are working together to get it. They didn’t check their brains at the door. They didn’t stop disagreeing, but their purpose was to get something done.”28

Chapter 8   Cities in Control? Finding Solutions to Broad Issues   463

[….] The city is the right subject today because hope has always been an urban currency and mayors have always in the first instance been optimists hoping to get something done. “The contrast between the optimism of urban commentators and the pessimism of those who focus on nations and multinational institutions,” observes urban blogger Matthew Taylor, “is striking.”29 Yet though a narrative of hope, the story of the city is marked by a dilemma: from the beginning of human communities, we have approached our towns and cities with ambivalence. We fear the urban even as (and perhaps because) it draws us in. The city is both magnet and repellent. Before measuring what we win in the human migration to cities, we must then, borrowing Peter Laslett’s somber phrase, take the measure of the world we have lost.30 And learn how to hold in creative tension the troubling dialectics of the city.

Notes   1

  2

  3

  4   5   6   7   8   9

Eric Corijn asks that precise question, “Can the city save the world,” in a work on rescaling the planet and remodeling the city. Eric Corijn, “Can the City Save the World,” in The Future of the Past: Reflections on History, Urbanity and Museums, ed. M. Nauwelaerets, Antwerp: Koning Boudewijn Stichting, 1999, pp. 263-280. Edward Glaeser, Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier, New York: Penguin Books, 2011, p. 15. The United Nations Population Fund reports that for 2008, 3.3 billion people, more than half of the world’s population, lived in cities, with 5 billion projected to do so in 2030. In the developed world, the percentage is much higher, approaching 70 percent. Compare these numbers with figures from the Population Reference Bureau: 3 percent of the population, lived in cities in 1800, and 30 percent in 1950. Today 90 percent of urbanization is occurring in developing nations, much of it in midsize towns and cities rather than just in megacities. There is, to be sure, some controversy over these figures because what counts as urban varies from region to region and can include people living in suburbs and towns with populations of as little as 50,000—in communities that may not feature many of the characteristics associated with the city as an essentialist construct. However, if the precise number is contested, the direction of the arrow—from country and town to urban and metropolitan-is unquestioned, and for the purposes of this book that is enough. The “representation” question must in any case be addressed, whether 50 percent, 25 percent, or 10 percent live outside of urban areas. John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems, New York: Henry Holt, 1927, p. 142. Ibid., p. 184. Mayor Bloomberg, Speech at MIT, November 29, 2011. Press Release of ICLEI (Local Governments for Sustainability), December 12, 2011. See www.cityprotocol.org. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, New York: Everyman edition, 1993, p. 433.

464  PART III    Crises and Ways Forward 10 Alderman Colón cited in Jay Walljasper, “How Cities Can Get Drivers Biking,” Yes Magazine, July 27, 2012, http://vvww.yesm.agazine.org/planet/how-cities-can -make-biking-safer. 11 As with Mayor Schuster here and throughout the book, I will cite interviews and “surveys” completed with mayors. These materials, including the complete survey results, can be found on the book website at www.ifmayorsruledtheworld.org. The comment in the text here is from the interview with Mayor Schuster, July 2012. The mayor of Stuttgart for two eight-year terms, who left office in 2013, has focused on building city networks and is former vice president of ICLEI. His work is proof again that Europe lives democratically in its cities. As he says, “step by step we develop our society from the citizens [up], first at the city level and then up to other levels, civil society and [the] culture of local democracy, which is missing in so many countries.” 12 Saskia Sassen, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001, p. 9. 13 See Benjamin R. Barber, on the Mailer campaign, “Birthday Party Politics,” Dissent, Summer 1973. 14 Richard Florida, “It’s Up to the Cities to Bring America Back,” Businessinsider. com, February 3, 2012, http://wvvw.businessinsider.com/richard-fiorida-its-up-tothe-cities-to-bring-america-back-2012-2. 15 Edward Glaeser, Triumph of the City, New York: Penguin, 2011, p. 15. 16 Max Weber, The City, Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1985, p. 25. 17 Edward C. Banfield, The Moral Basis of a Backward Society, New York: Free Press, 1958. 18 Pelu Awofeso, “One Out of Every Two Nigerians Now Lives in a City,” World Policy Journal, Winter 2010-2011, p. 68. 19 Richard Dobbs, Sven Smit, Jaana Remes, James Manyika, Charles Roxburgh, and Alejandra Restrepo, Urban World: Mapping the Economic Power of Cities, McKinsey Global Institute, March, 2011, http://www.mckinsey.com/insights / urbanization/urban_world. 20 Part of this relates to time zones in servicing, say, stock markets, but beyond “the times zones, there is an operational aspect that suggests a distinct trans-territorial economy for a specific set of functions.” Sassen, The Global City, p.327. 21 Constantinos Doxiadis, Ekistics, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966. 22 There are a number of visionary science fiction works on the city, for example by Clifford D Simak (The City, 1952) and William Gibson (Neurumancer, 1984). 23 James Lovelock, Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth, 1979, 3rd ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000, p. 1. See also James Lovelock, The Revenge of Gaia: Earth’s Climate Crisis and the Fate of Humanity, New York: Basic Books, 2007. 24 Barcelona in Catalonia (Spain) is among the most visionary cities, the home not only of the IAAC, but of the new City Protocol project described in Chapters 5, 9, and 12. See IAAC (Barcelona), Third Advanced Architectural Contest: Self Sufficient City (Envisioning the Habitat of the Future), 2010. 25 Masao Miyoshi, “A Borderless World? From Colonialism to Transnationalism and the Decline of the Nation State,” Critical Inquiry, Vol. 19, No. 4 (Summer r993), pp. 726-751.

Chapter 8   Cities in Control? Finding Solutions to Broad Issues   465 26 David A. Wylie, City, Save Thyself! Boston: Trueblood Publishing, 2009, p. l3l. 27 Ibid., p. 201. 28 Bill Clinton’s Democratic Convention Speech, September 5, 2012, http://abcnews. go.com/Politics/OTUS/transcript-bill-clintons-democratic-convention-speech/ story?id=r7r64662. 29 Matthew Taylor, “Inter-city Thoughts,” Matthew Taylor’s Blog, October 16 2012, http://www.matthewtaylorsblog.com/uncategorized/inter-city-thoughts/. 30 Peter Laslett’s moving account of the withering of village life in England, The World We Have Lost, New York: Methuen, 1965.

INDEX Note: Bold page numbers refer to tables; italic page numbers refer to figures and page numbers followed by “n” denote endnotes. Abrams, Philip 38 Abramson, Jerry 101 activist structures 177 advanced systems 82, 91 advertising campaign 173–174 African American Health Equity Task Force 431 African Immigrant and Refugee Resource Center 202 Agenda 21 311, 312 agricultural revolution 62 Aiken, Michael 11 AirbnbCitizen (AirbnbAction) 175, 180 Airbnb in New York City 146, 168–180; business model 172, 180; communitybuilding 169, 170, 172, 175, 177–180; contesting 174–175; ‘host community’ 172–174, 176, 178–180; integrating 176–178; lobbying 169–170, 172, 173, 175, 179; as model 169–170; organizing 175–176; quantifying 178–179; and rent-pricing 172–173; strategy of 173; visualizing 173–174 air: conditioning 259, 260, 294–300; quality 313; temperature 302–303 Aldama, Olivia 379–381, 385, 388, 389, 394 Alford, Robert 11 Alianza Latinoamericana por los Derechos de los

Inmigrantes (Latin American Alliance for Immigrant Rights) 205–206 Alliance for the Great Lakes 304 Allis, John 303 Alphabet 86, 96 Alvarado, Yimel 376–381, 384, 388, 389, 393–395 Amazon 80, 92–94, 96 Amazon HQ2 86–88, 93, 94, 96 American Civil Liberties Union 157 American Community Survey (2009) 267 American National Election Study (ANES) 9 American Political Science Association (APSA) 53, 54 American Rescue Plan 445 American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funds 428, 430, 431; city operations 431–432; economic and workforce development 433–434; housing 433; infrastructure 432–433; public health 431 American Sociological Association (ASA) 53, 54 Amsterdam 113–115 Anderson, Elijah 221, 353, 355 annexation 26, 49n16, 108 anti-Asian agitation 196 anti-capitalism 169 anti-democratic decisionmaking 162 antidiscrimination legislation on housing (1968) 42

antitax forces 42 Apple 205 Aristotle 455 Asimov, Isaac 457 “Assassination of New York” (Fitch) 172 astroturfing 177, 178, 180 Atkin, Douglas 173 Atkinson, Rowland 337 Atlanta 4, 5, 25, 34, 35, 37–41, 111, 326, 427 authoritarian regimes 63 Avery v. Midland County 162 Axelrod, Donald 138n5 Axelrod, Robert 37 Ayers, Thomas 129 Bachelor, L. 107 Bachrach, P. 11 “back to the city” movement 49n17 Baer, William 262; “On the Death of Cities” 262 Bailey, R. 106 Baltimore 121 Banfield, Edward C. 7, 20, 412, 456 Baratz, M. 11 Barber, Benjamin 157, 429 Barbrook, Richard 173 Barnard, Chester 32, 33 Barrett, Tom 417 Bartik, Tim 446 Beauregard, R. 365 Bedford-Stuyvesant 356 behavioral revolution 52 Belnavis, Chris 415

467

468  Index Benjamin, W. 364 Benjamin Thompson and Associates 134 Bennett, A. 68 Bennett, L. 122 big tech 79, 80, 82, 95–97 bike-share program 450 bilingual education 203 Bill of Rights 152, 163, 164 Binelli, Mark 262, 270–272 biracial coalition 39, 40, 42 Black Lives Matter movement 375, 407, 414, 415, 416 Black middle class 5, 40, 42, 43, 194; homebuyers 194, 230 Black middlemen in North Kenwood-Oakland 194, 221–224; activism 232, 236; brokers 194, 195, 223, 230, 232; choosing sides 222–224; concept 219–221; concessions 221; machine politics 232, 236; mortgage capital 224–232, 236; rising property values and 231–236 Black-on-Black violence 376, 416, 417, 419 Black(s): elites 195, 224; mayors 111; neighborhoods 40, 194, 221, 230, 357–359; political incorporation of 40; poverty 42, 53, 201, 204, 278, 280, 408–409; public employment for 42; subordination of 36, 40 Blasio, Bill de 379, 432 Blaylock, Hubert 237n3 Blecharczyk, Nathan 169 Bledsoe, Timothy 11 Bloomberg, Michael 448–452 Boeing Aircraft 24–25 Boland, Katherine 177 Boltanski, Luc 177; “New Spirit of Capitalism” 177 Bonacich, Edna 237n3 Bonilla-Silva, E. 410, 411 borderless world 460 Borgota 154 Boston 106 Brammeier, Joel 304 Brandtjen, Janel 418 “Brand Zones” 164 Branson, Richard 457 Bratton, William 416 Brenner, Robert 170 Bridges, Amy 61 Bridgewater Commons Mall 148 Bridgewater Township 148 Bronx 401, 405–406

Brookings Institution 373, 443 Brookings Metro 430 Brooklyn 295, 362 Brown, Willie 212 Browning, Rufus 11 Brown-Saracino, J. 350, 366 Brundtland, Gro Harlem 311 Brundtland Commission report 311, 312 bureaucracy 13, 119, 315 Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) 265 Burns, N. 120, 121, 124 Burt, Ronald 220 business: interests 4, 5, 159; leadership 40, 43, 64, 317; taxes 102 business district 149; central 5, 112, 129, 155; downtown 153, 154, 157 business-government bargaining 101–116; capital mobility argument 105–106; cities-lose-if-business-wins argument 104–105; citycannot-choose argument 106–107; city-maximizesgrowth argument 107–108; market conditions and public control 103; political control 115–116; popular-control systems 108–111; state intervention 111–115 business improvement districts (BIDs) 146, 159–161, 166–167n34; power of 160–161; social and political consequences 161–164 Butler, Paula 232 Butler, Tim 337, 353, 359 Byrne, Jane 128, 133, 139n11 C40 Cities 449 Calgary 60 California 152, 193, 194, 197, 203, 206, 399 California State Constitution 152 California State Supreme Court 151 Callery, Jacqueline 228–229, 232–233 Cameron, Andy 173 Campus Martius 273 Canadian Pacific Railway 60 Canarsie 295 Cannery 161 capital investment 4, 29, 102, 103, 107–109, 111–112

capitalism 45, 146, 376, 408 capital markets 107 carbon emissions 313, 459 “Care Not Cash” initiative 213 CARES Act (2020) 433, 434 causal chains 68, 69 causal mechanisms 68 Cavanagh, Jerome 266 Census Bureau 8, 9, 88 Census Metropolitan Area (CMA) 344 Center for American Women in Politics (CAWP) 239 The Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO), Stanford University 187 Cermeli, Jonathan 378 Chamber of Commerce 159, 163, 214 charter schools 147, 184–189; controversy 185–186; decisions of federal policymakers 188–189; definition 184–185; law 184; vs. non-charter schools 187–188, 188; public school students in 186, 186 Charter Schools Program (CSP) 188 Chauvin, Derek 195, 375 Chen, J. T. 395 Chesky, Brian 169 Chiapello, Eve 177; “New Spirit of Capitalism” 177 Chicago 81, 119, 120–125, 128, 130, 132–135, 138, 234, 260, 281, 300–310, 317, 352, 356, 360, 414, 429, 430, 462 Chicago Bears franchise 130, 137 Chicago City Council 235 Chicago Department of Housing 235 Chicago Department of Planning and Development 227 Chicago Harbor 307 Chicago Housing Authority 238n13 Chicagoland 129 Chicago Park District 129, 130 Chicago Plan (1909) 132 Chicago Reporter 223 Chicago River 130, 132, 301, 303, 305 Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal 305 Chicago School 53

Index  469 Chicago Tribune 122–123, 133, 227, 229, 305 Chinese Exclusion Act (1882) 196 Chinese for Affirmative Action 202, 210 Chinese Progressive Association 203 Chisholm, John 416 citizenship 181, 198, 201, 216, 228, 462 city: councils 12, 14, 122, 133, 134, 323, 328, 329; experiencing decline 436–437, 437, 438; government 22, 56, 109–111, 123–125, 129, 136, 168, 216; growth rates 434–435, 435–436; officials 107, 131, 194, 215, 216, 319, 335; politics 6–8, 45, 315, 326, 328; population and housing unit estimates using administrative data 440; population gain 437–438, 439, 440; population losses 438, 441–442; relations with business 80; small town population trends 439; see also individual entries City Hall 4, 5, 379 “City Hall at the Mall” 155 city interests 19–31; capital 28–30; definition 19–23; economic interests 24–26; labor 27–28; land 26–27; local government and 30–31 City Limits (Peterson) 6 City Protocol network 449 city trenches 61 civil liberties 150, 164 Civil Rights Acts (1968) 396 Civil Rights movement 52, 418 civil rights organizations 58 “Civil Sidewalks” initiative 213 civil society 211, 311–329, 429, 450; see also sustainable development Civil War 195 Clarke, David 415–417 Cleaver, Eldridge 219 Clemons, Kirk 232 climate change 259–261, 294, 300–302, 312, 328, 430, 449, 450 Climate Initiative, of Clinton Foundation 312 climate protection 90; policies 316

Climate Protection Agreement, of U.S. Conference of Mayors 312 Clinton, Bill 175, 185, 229, 230, 462 Clover, Joshua 171 coalition-building 4, 11, 14, 15, 41 Coalition for Justice 415 Cobo Hall Convention Center 276n14 Cohen, Cathy J. 45 Cohen, Gerry 339–341, 346; ‘Expensive Taste Rides Again’ 341; ‘On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice’ 340 Coleman, Emmett 225, 226 Colomb, C. 172 Colon, Rey 450 Colorado 152 Columbian Exposition World’s Fair (1893) 128 Comerica Park 273 Comiskey Park/U.S. Cellular Field 125, 126, 130 Commission on Interracial Cooperation (1919) 39 Commonwealth Edison 129 communism 59–60 Community Compact 175, 178 Community Mediation and Resolution Center 433 Community Reinvestment Act (1977) 58 Comparative and Historical Sociology, ASA 53 competitive reurbanism 286 Computer Revolution 82 Compuware 270, 273 concentrated deconcentration 114 ConEd 259, 295, 299 Conservation Community Council 227, 233 conservative cities 321, 330n3 constitutional rights 149–151 Constitution of California 207 contemporary crisis theory 170 continuous quality improvement (CQI) 315 conversion 66, 67 Cooper, Gail 299 coronavirus 377, 381, 388, 393, 395, 401, 402, 404 corporate reform 177 corporate welfare 82 cosmopolitanism 448, 457 Cotton, Tom 427

council wars 122 COVID-19 cases in New York City 401–407, 426; deaths 401, 405, 406, 407; impact on communities of color 401, 402, 406, 407; mortality 401, 405, 406; positive case quintiles 402, 402, 403, 404–405; risk of exposure 404–406 COVID-19 Local Action Tracker, NLC 430, 431 COVID-19 pandemic 86, 92–93, 373, 374, 377, 381, 426, 430, 434; cases 376–395, 401, 404; deaths 388–391, 393, 395, 405, 405; funds 428; impact on non-whites 396; morbidity 374, 395–398; mortality 374, 395–398, 405; racial/ ethnic inequities in 396, 398, 399; structurally vulnerable neighborhoods 397–398; structural racism and neighborhoods 396; vulnerability 374, 375, 398, 404; see also COVID-19 cases in New York City COVID-19 Response Center 433 Cox, Murray 178, 179 Coyle 214 Crain’s Detroit Business 273 Crenson, M. 107 critical junctures 55–60, 68, 69 crowd-based-capitalism 169 crowdsourcing 146 Cuomo, Andrew M. 163, 176, 377, 382 Dahl, Robert 7, 11, 53, 71; Who Governs? 53 Dahmer, Jeffrey 415 Daley, Richard J. 122, 138n3 Daley, Richard M. 121, 122, 133–135, 223 Day Labor Program 203 debt financing 29 Declaration of Human Rights 461 deindustrialization 82, 83, 113, 114, 171, 172, 176, 257, 281, 419 DeLeon, R. E. 214 democracy 8, 10, 11, 447, 448, 450, 453, 455, 460, 462; deliberative 158; political institutions 108, 109; reforms 61; theories 158

470  Index Democratic National Convention (2012) 462 Democratic Party 122 Denver 26, 101, 102, 124 Department of Homeland Security 415 Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) 163 Des Plaines River 305 Detroit 107, 111, 113–114, 115, 257–258, 276n18, 427; bankruptcy 257, 262, 263, 274, 279, 286; business establishments in 264; City Council in 268–269; as do-ityourself city 272, 279, 284; economic functions 264; failure of political leadership and mismanagement 265; gray space 284, 288; legacy of disinvestment 288, 291; 1967 riot 266; population decline and whites migration 264, 266, 267; quality of public services 263–264; racism 265–266, 268; recovery and plans for revival 270–274; reliance on automobile industry 267; ruins of 269–270; selfprovisioning and resident activism 279–280, 282–284; sustainability in 259; unemployment 264–265; urban death 274–275 Detroit Future City 265 Detroit Institute of Art 263 Detroit Land Bank Authority 259 Detroit Public Lighting Authority 264 development politics 103, 104 DeVos, Betsy 185 Dewey, John 448 Dexter Training Ground park 363 Diane, Wong 47 Dillon’s Rule 120 direct subsidy 114 discriminatory entry requirements 147 Disney World 106 displacement 42, 44, 66–67, 178, 194, 222, 233, 236, 333–337, 342, 344, 347, 351, 374 do-it-yourself urbanism see selfprovisioning downtown redevelopment programs 63, 64

Doxiadis, Constantinos 457 drift as nondecisionmaking 67 Dromm, Daniel 379 droughts 260 DuBois, W. E. B. 220, 228; double consciousness 220, 221, 228 Dudley Street Initiative 44, 50n25 due process clause 151 Duncker, James 307 Duneier, Mitchell 221 Dworkin, Ronald 340, 341 Dyck, Joshua 10 Earth Summit (1992) 311 “earth system science,” NASA 457 Eastern Waterfront 89–91 East-West trade flows 26 e-commerce 86 economic crisis: and community 170–171; in New York City 171–173 economic development/growth 4, 25, 28, 30, 63, 107, 311, 313, 314, 319, 321, 329, 428 economic equality/inequality 339, 344 economic interests 22, 24–26 economic restructuring 42, 43, 82 ecosystems 313 Ecumenopolis 457, 458 Edgar, Jim 135 Edge Cities 155, 156 egalitarianism 339–342, 455 Einhorn, Eddie 131 Ekistics 457 Elazar, D. J. 26 elitism/structuralism 119 Ellis, Josh 301 Elmhurst Hospital Center 374, 377, 380–384, 386–390, 392, 394 Emanuel, Rahm 450 Emergency Rental Assistance funds 433 employment 84, 85, 89, 93, 97, 177, 203, 204, 224, 229, 240, 267, 270, 273, 274, 281, 285, 288, 313, 362, 396, 411, 454 Energy Efficiency and Conservation Block Grant 319 English-only laws 203 English-plus laws 203 entrepreneurialism 169, 267, 419 Environmental Coordinating Council 315

environmental degradation 108 environmentalism 314–317, 326 environmental nonprofit groups and organizations 317, 319, 322, 323–324, 324–326, 328, 329 environmental policies 318, 321, 322, 326, 327 environmental programs 318, 326, 329 environmental protection 315–318, 318–319, 321–324, 323, 326–329 ethnic politics 5 Europe 26, 59, 61, 80, 112 European Community 450 Eurozone 450 exclusion 39, 65, 203, 241, 266, 267, 289, 334, 336–337, 347 ‘Expensive Taste Rides Again’ (Cohen) 341 expensive tastes 339–341 export industry 24–26 Facebook 205 factional polities 193–195 Fair Housing Act (1968) 58, 60, 71n4 fair housing policies 58, 61 Fairweather, Phillip 381 Familia Alvarado 379, 385, 393, 395 Faneuil Hall Marketplace 154, 161 Fanon, Frantz 222 Fashion District BID 167n44 federal funding 41, 42, 44, 81, 120 federal government 9, 16n17, 42, 58, 63, 205, 215–217, 298, 327, 328, 427 Federal Housing Administration 10 federal housing policy 10 federal immigration enforcement 194, 197 federal taxes 23, 230 female mayors 195, 239–253; female candidates and barriers to representation in elected office 241–243, 252, 255n26; in Houston 240; in Texas 195, 240, 246–252, 247–248, 249–251; and their governing municipalities 243–246, 245 Ferguson, Miriam “Ma” 246 Ferman, B. 214 festival marketplaces 161 fictitious capitals 170–171

Index  471 Filion, Pierre 79, 80 financialisation 170 Fisher, P. 82 Fitch, Robert 172; “Assassination of New York” 172 fixed capital 105 flexible capital 105 flooding 260, 261 Flores, Elizabeth “Betty” 244 Florida 106, 131 Florida, Richard 455 Floyd, George 195, 375 Flynn, Edward 412, 415–417 Fondren Library 246 Food Employees v. Logan Valley Plaza 391 U.S. 308 (1968) 165n5 Ford Hall 115 Fort Greene 356, 357, 361 Fort Wayne 102 Fox Theater 273 freedom of speech 150–152, 156–159, 164 Freeman, Lance 337 freestyle commercial development 115 Frug, G. E. 120 functionalist approaches 56 Gaia 457, 458 Galster, George 262, 264, 266, 267, 269, 272 Gamm, G. 120 Gans, H. J. 361, 362 Garreau, Joel 155 Gaventa, J. 11 Gebbia, Joe 169 gender stereotypes 242, 246 General Motors 104, 115, 270, 271 gentrification/gentrifier 43, 50n20, 194, 195, 205, 233, 236, 333–347; aesthetic pull 352, 353, 359, 360, 362; amenity pull 352–354, 358–359, 362; concepts 365; critique of 335; definition 335–337; democracy, territoriality, and place 342–343; diagnostic tool 352–355; economic displacement 353, 355, 365; economic pull 352, 353, 356, 358–361; and egalitarianism 339–342; harms of 336, 343, 347; inconveniences 354, 362; libertarian approach to 337–339; literature on 365, 366; phenomenon of 350–351; polarization and

homogeneity 343–346; practical pull 352, 353, 356, 358–364; second wave of 355, 358; signal neighborhood 353, 355, 357, 360; social pull 352, 354, 358, 362–364; socio-cultural change 353, 355, 357; symbolic pull 352, 354, 363; unwitting 356 George, A. L. 68 Ghitter, G. 60 Gibson, William 457 Gilbert, Dan 258–259, 273, 274, 277n22 Giloth, R. 129 Gimpel, James 10 Gingrich, Newt 457 GIS mapping 443 Glaeser, Edward 266, 448, 455 Glass, R. L. 335, 358 Global Financial Crisis (2008) 168, 169 global governance 447, 453, 458 globalization 41, 46, 83, 105, 317, 447, 448, 453 global village 457 global warming 297, 302, 449 glocality 448, 462 Goffman, Erving 410 Golding, William 458 Goldner, Loren 171 Google 90, 91, 96, 205 Gore, Al 229, 230 Gosnell, Harold 7 governing arrangements 40, 42, 47, 54–58, 60, 66, 67 governing coalitions 32, 34, 35, 37, 41, 45, 81, 136, 326 government of San Francisco 207–213; district elections 211–212; Immigrant Rights Commission (IRC) 209–211; mayor and Board of Supervisors 207–209, 211, 212, 215, 217; Office of Civic Engagement and Immigrant Affairs 209–211; partisanship and parties 211–212; voter initiatives 212–213 government subsidies 163 Grand Central BID 162, 163 Grand Central Partnership 162, 163 Greater Downtown Detroit (GDD) 270–272, 276n16 “great inversion” 43, 46, 49n17 Great Lakes 301–304, 430

Great Lakes Basin 306 Great Migration 42 Great Recession (2008–2009) 84, 86, 278–280, 291 Great Society 42 greenhouse gases (GHGs) 297, 298, 312, 313 green jobs 314 Greuel, Wendy 241 Gronewold, Drew 302 Grotius, Hugo 458–459 group rights 342–343 Gruen, Victor 154 Guida, Eddie, Jr. 392 Guida Funeral Home 391 Gulf Shipbuilding Corporation 149 Habermann, Tom 391, 392 Habermas, Jürgen 158 Hackworth, Jason 336 Hahn Company 157 Hajnal, Zoltan 13 Halpern, Robert 50n27 Hamilton, Dontre 407, 415, 416 Hamilton Heights 361 Hantz, John 273 Harbor Lock 306 Harlem 296, 361, 362 Hart-Celler Act (1965) 198 Hayek, Friedrich 338, 339; ‘Housing and Town Planning’ 338 health care policy 63 Health in All Policies (HiAP) 399 heat-related illness 294, 299 heat-resistant building materials 298 heat waves 259, 260, 294–296, 299, 300 Herndon, Angelo 40 high-tech firms 83, 85, 86, 95 historical sociology 38 Hobbes, Thomas 459 Holland 112, 113, 115 Hollander, Justin 258; Sunburnt Cities 258 Home Energy Assistance Program (HEAP) 296 homeless people 162–164, 168n51, 287, 342 Home Owners Loan Corporation 10 home-rental platform 169 home rule charter (1898) 207 “Home-Sharing Activity Reports” 178 Home Sharing Clubs 175–177, 180 Horak, Martin 59, 60

472  Index household income 195, 201, 204, 252, 271, 344 Housing Act (1949) 63, 67 ‘Housing and Town Planning’ (Hayek) 338 housing subsidies 114, 115 Houston 315, 317 Hudgens v. NLRB 424 U.S. 507 (1976) 152, 165n5 Hulchanski, David 334; ‘The Three Cities Within Toronto: Income Polarization Among Toronto’s Neighbourhoods, 1970-2000’ 334 human capital 43, 46, 82, 84, 236, 272 Hunger Games-style civic competition 87 Hunter, F. 11 Hutchinson, Kay Bailey 246 Hyatt McCormick Place 138 hyperpluralism 213–214 Iavicoli, Laura 380, 381, 388–390 ICLEI’s Climate Protection Programme 312 Illegal Immigration Relief Act (2006) 207 Illinois 123, 125, 131, 134 Illinois General Assembly 128, 130–131, 133, 138n3, 9 Illinois Sports Facilities Authority (ISFA) 122, 126, 130–132, 135, 138, 139n10 Immigrant Rights Commission (IRC) 209–211 immigrant(s) 5, 196–198, 201; activism 193, 198; African Americans, Latinos and Asians 198, 211–212, 214, 220, 287–288; bluecollar 374; challenges faced by 217; integration policies 196, 202, 203, 207, 211–213, 215–217; labor rights 203; language rights 203; limited English proficient 202–203; low-wage workers 203–205; Mexican 220, 288; rights 196, 197, 207, 209, 211–213, 213–217, 215, 216, 217; socioeconomic characteristics 200–201, 201; undocumented 4, 196, 205–207, 216–217 immigrant-serving nonprofits 196, 202, 203, 208, 209, 211, 213, 214, 216, 217

immigration 43, 44; laws 197; policy 4, 194; reform 206; see also immigrant(s) Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) 194 income inequality 334 income taxes 88, 95 incomplete gentrification 344 Indiana 102, 107, 248, 445 individual human behavior 52, 312 industrial development 63 industrial economy 170 industrialization 61, 62, 456 Industrial Revolution 444 informal arrangements 5, 32–35, 39, 136, 137 informal organization 32 information technology 82, 83, 84 Innovative Design and Economic Acceleration District 91–92 Inside Airbnb 178 instant cities 456 Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia (IAAC) 458 Institute Laboral de la Raza (the People’s Labor Institute) 203 Institute of Architects Sustainable Design Assessment Team 272 institutional development 55, 64, 65 institutionalized practices 10 institutional reforms 67 intergovernmental relations 80 intergovernmental triads 81, 119, 122–125, 124, 128–130, 133–138 International City/County Management Association surveys (2004–2009) 85 International Institute for Sustainable Development 297 Jacobs, Jane 262, 354, 362, 364 Jameson, Fredric 171 Jefferson, Brian Jordan 416 Jehovah’s Witness 149–150 Jennings, J. L. 59 Jim Crow 39, 411, 418 job-training programs 162–163, 205 John, Peter 12 Joliet, Louis 304, 306 Jones, Bryan D. 47, 107 Journal of Urban Affairs 53 Judd, Dennis 6, 7 Justice for Janitors 44

Kahn, Albert 269 Kant, Immanuel 459; Perpetual Peace 459 Kantor, Paul 80 Karmanos, Peter 273 Katznelson, Ira 61 Kaufman, Herbert 11 Kearse (Judge) 162 Kelley, Robin D. G. 412 Kelling, George 412, 416, 418 Kenwood Oakland Community Organization (KOCO) 229, 230 Kessler, Robert 162 Kessler, Stuart 381, 388 Kilroy, Tony 213, 214 Kinshasa-Brazzaville 456 Klinenberg, Eric 299; Palaces of the People 299 Kneebone, Elizabeth 264 knowledge economy 83 Knoxville, Tennessee 154–155 Knoxville Center 155 Koolhaas, Rem 164 Krieger, N. 395 Kuhn, Thomas 70 Ku Klux Klan 39 labor: laws 152; market 28, 87, 170, 202, 204, 205, 264, 446; unions 36, 156, 176, 212–214, 319 Lacy, Ernest 415 La Defense 112 Lagos-Ibadan-Cotonou region 456 Lake Michigan 260, 301–303, 305–308 Lakeview 233 Lakewood Community Services Center 433 Landes, Bertha Knight 243 landscape qualities 26 land use 27, 43, 172, 215, 327; controls 108 Laslett, Peter 463 layering 67 League of Nations 458 League of Women Voters 243 Lechmere 156 LeDuff, Charlie 262, 265 Lehane, Chris 175 LeWeb conference (2013) 173 Lewis, Oscar 408 liberal-democratic system 102 liberalism 316, 321, 322, 324, 329, 330n3 liberalization 197 liberal theory 342 Light Rail Transit (LRT) 91, 94, 96

Index  473 Lindblom, C. E. 102 Link, B. G. 410 Lloyd, R. 353 Lloyd Center 152–153 Lloyd Corp. v. Tanner (1972) 150–152 lobbying 85, 128–131, 134, 135, 163, 169, 170, 172, 173, 175, 176, 179, 193, 214, 317 local elections 8, 9, 11, 14, 195, 211, 239, 241, 243, 322 Local Elections in America Project 252 local government 9, 16n17, 20, 22, 23, 25, 27, 29, 30–31, 35, 84–86, 94, 95, 102–104, 106–107, 109, 111, 112, 115–116, 119, 134, 137 Local Government ARPA Investment Tracker, NLC 430 Local Governments for Sustainability (ICLEI) 312, 449 local politics 3, 4, 6–10, 13–15, 15n9, 30, 103, 134, 313 London 102, 105, 108, 110, 353, 356, 449, 456, 462 Long Island City 86–88, 92, 93; socio-economic characteristics of 88 Lorde, Audre 219 Los Angeles 102, 317, 359, 429, 462 Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy (LAANE) 44 Louisville 315 Lovelock, James 457, 458 Lowi, Theodore 7 Low Income Housing Tax Credit program 229 luck egalitarianism 339, 340, 346 Maaranen, Richard 344, 345 machine politics 36, 110, 232, 236 Mackinac Center for Public Policy 265 Madigan, Michael 129 Mahoney, James 56, 60, 66, 67 Mailer, Norman 452 Main Street USA 154 Mall of America 153, 154, 156 Mankin, Helen Douglas 40 marginalization 195 marginalized groups 195 market-centered model 103, 104, 106, 107 market: economy 24; failures 82, 111

Marquette, Jacques 304 Marshall, Dale Rogers 11 Marshall, Thurgood 219 Marsh v. Alabama (1946) 149–151, 154 Martelle, Scott 262, 267, 268, 270, 276n13 Martinez, Nelda 240 Marx, Karl 55, 171 Maso, I. 350 Massachusetts 152 Master Innovation and Development Plan 90–92, 95 mayors 4–5, 122, 132, 133, 135, 300, 326, 328, 429, 448–451, 454, 458, 461–464; see also female mayors Mayors Against Illegal Guns 449 McClory, R. 129 McCormick Place 133, 137, 139n17 McKittrick, Katherine 409 McLuhan, Marshall 457 McNally, David 170 McNutt, John 177 megacities 453, 454, 457 megamalls 154 Melamed, J. 410 metro areas 442–446; economies 444; leadership and challenges 444–445; resurgence of 443–444; and urban/rural divide 443, 445–446 Metropolitan Pier and Exposition Authority (MPEA) 125, 132–135, 137, 138, 139n17 Metropolitan Planning Council 301 metropolitan policy 443 Mexican-American War 198 Mexico City Pact 449 Michael, Jones-Correa 47 Michigan 114, 274 middleman minorities 237n3 Milk, Harvey 211 Mill Creek 158–159 Miller, David 343 “Million Trees + Houston” public–private partnership 315 Milwaukee, Wisconsin 63–64, 414, 427; Black male incarceration in 407–408; cause of Black poverty 408–409; co-constitution of crime and poverty 411–412; police reforms and white

supremacy 415, 417–419; racialization 411–412; racism and culture of poverty 411; stigma and territorial stigmatization 410; zipcode 53206 as spatial euphemism 412–417 Milwaukee Journal Sentinel 417 Milwaukee Police Department (MPD) 407, 414, 415 Minnesota 26; Minnesota Constitution 156; Minnesota State Supreme Court 156 Mississippi River 304, 309 Mississippi River Basin 301, 304, 306, 430 Miyoshi, Masao 460 mobile capital 103, 215 Mollenkopf, J. 104 Molotch, H. L. 110 Montreal 344 moral geographies 287–290 Moscone, George 211 Moses, Robert 109 Mossberger, K. 135 Moya, Francisco 379 Moynihan, Daniel Patrick 408, 419; The Negro Family 408, 419 Muhammad, Khalil 417 multicausality 41, 47 multiethnicity 44 multilocational corporations 105 multinational firms 85 multitiered process 5, 41, 46, 48n12 multi-use malls 154, 155 municipal government 119, 120, 279, 284, 286 municipal reform 61–62 Nashville 44 National Association of Counties 430 national government 7, 29, 111, 112, 312, 313, 451, 452 National Register of Historic Places 310 Navy Pier 122, 125–126, 129, 132–134, 136–138, 138n9 Navy Pier Development Authority (NPDA) 133, 139n14 The Negro Family (Moynihan) 408, 419 neighborhood change 333–336, 343, 355 Neighborhood Jobs Trust fund 433 neoliberal capitalism 292

474  Index neoliberal governance 285–286 neoliberalism 346 networked cities 448, 450, 453 New Jersey 148, 152, 158; New Jersey State Supreme Court 158 New Orleans 121, 124 “New Spirit of Capitalism” (Boltanski & Chiapello) 177 New Urban Frontier (Smith) 335 New York City (NYC) 11, 59, 86–88, 90, 93, 95, 96, 102, 109, 148, 157, 159, 163, 259, 295, 296, 317, 337, 352, 361, 362, 373, 374, 427, 429, 444, 450; see also Airbnb in New York City; COVID-19 cases in New York City New York City Central Parks 306 New York Hotel and Motel Trade Council 175 New York Multiple Dwelling Law (2010) 176 New York State 452 The New York State Assembly Housing Committee 176 New York Times 375 noncitizen voting 213 noncooperation 37, 65 non-partisan systems 11 North America 80, 82, 89, 153, 294, 304, 334, 347 Norton, R. D. 262 Novak, William 13 Novy, J. 172 NYU Furman Center 374, 375 Obama, Barack 175, 184, 185 Office of Civic Engagement and Immigrant Affairs (OCEIA) 209–211 Oklahoma City 101 Oliver, Eric 10 Olson, Mancur 37 OLS regression analysis 323, 325 Olympics (2016) 128, 138 one-person, one-vote 161, 162 online peer-to-peer feedback systems 169 online platforms 168, 169 Ontario 86, 89–93, 342 ‘On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice’ (Cohen) 340 “On the Death of Cities” (Baer) 262 open immigration policies 62 optimum size thesis 20–22 Order of Black Shirts 39

Oregon 152 The Origins of the Urban Crisis (Sugrue) 264 Orlando 106 Our Common Future report see Brundtland Commission report Pacific Northwest 24 Palaces of the People (Klinenberg) 299 Pallas, A. M. 59 parallel processing 48–49n13 Paris 106, 110 Park, Robert 219–220, 237n4; “marginal man” 219 Parker, Annise 240 party labels 11, 12, 211 Patch, Jason 333 path dependence 55–61 Patillo, Mary 281 Pattillo, Mary 45 Peers 172, 173 Pennsylvania 427 people of color: discriminatory policies on 396; living in structurally vulnerable neighborhoods 397; rates of chronic disease 397; violence against 195, 375 Perpetual Peace (Kant) 459 Peter, A. 82 Peters, Gayle 226, 227, 229 Peterson, Paul 6; City Limits 6 Peterson, P. E. 103, 104, 214, 215 Phelan, J. C. 410 Philadelphia 427, 444 philanthropic foundations 43, 44 The Philosophy of Money (Simmel) 364 Phoenix 44 Pierson, Paul 54, 62, 63, 69, 71, 72n8 Pipa, Tony 446 platform-capitalism 169 platform cooperativism 180 pluralism 45, 119, 194 polarization and homogenization 337, 343–347 Polar Vortex 303 Poletown 115 policy feedback 52, 55, 58, 59, 63, 64, 65 policymaking 169, 177, 195, 209, 211, 213, 214, 312, 315–317, 319, 329 political: activity 8, 9, 58, 156, 157; control 104, 110, 113; development 13, 53, 54, 61,

66, 67, 70; economy 29, 35, 36, 102, 409; parties 11–12, 110, 111, 176; polarization 427; powers 4, 20, 22, 24, 110; processes 3, 4, 10, 20, 52, 55, 58, 59, 67, 69; science 3, 5–8, 12, 14, 15, 70; support 102, 105, 109 Politics and History, APSA 53 popular control 35, 40, 102, 103, 108–111, 113, 116 Portland 315 postindustrialism 79, 105 poverty: concentrated 278, 409, 411; culture of 408, 411, 412; racialized 408, 409; urban 280, 409 Prague 59–60 Preckwinkle, Alderman Toni 233, 235 private actors 104, 123, 137, 145, 146, 151 private capital 101, 105 private interests 35–36 private investment 80, 82 privately owned public spaces (POPS) 145 private market 29, 146 private ownership 35, 39, 149 private property 149–151, 154, 164, 342 private sector 81, 83, 86, 96, 102, 109, 111, 112, 115, 119, 123, 133, 134, 136, 137, 147 private security forces 155, 163, 164, 168n51 private space 155, 156 privatization 133, 146–149, 152–157, 171, 215, 286 process tracing 68–69 productive economy 170 programmatic objectives 110, 111 Progressive Era 61–62 property rights 150, 154 property taxes 22, 80, 88, 95, 155, 231, 355 Providence 352 Providence Revolving Fund 363 Pruneyard Shopping Center v. Robins (1980) 151, 156 public authorities 32, 108–111, 134 Public Authorities Control Board 88 public-benefit corporations 109 public education 146–147 public funding 163, 185 public housing 19, 67, 346

Index  475 public infrastructure 92, 112, 119 public opinion 19, 101, 108 public ownership 89, 163 public policies 20, 21, 83, 149, 152–156, 335 public-private coalitions 79–81 public protest 145 public schools 67, 147, 184, 185–188 public sector 43, 79, 83, 89, 91, 93, 96, 102, 104, 109, 115, 119, 145 public spaces 145, 146, 149, 150, 154, 156–158, 275, 299, 342 public sphere 149; politics and 156–159 public square 145, 146 public subsidy 23, 85, 96, 97, 215 public transportation policies 59, 60 Purpose Built Communities model 399 quality of life 84, 317, 328 Quayside site 89–94; socioeconomic characteristics of 89 Quicken Loans 258, 270, 271, 273 race relations 39 race riot 39, 276n13 racial capitalism 409, 410, 418, 419 racial discrimination 175, 195, 196, 227, 375, 396 racialization 411–412, 419 racialized criminalization 410 racial segregation 10, 39, 188, 296, 375, 396, 411, 418, 419 racism 296, 374–376, 409, 418; colorblind 410, 411, 418; cultural 411; institutional 374; structural 374, 396, 398, 399, 408, 412 Rae, Douglas 62–63 Randstad 113 rational choice theory 53, 72n8 redevelopment era 43, 44, 46 redlining 42, 225, 226, 296 Reed, Adolph 224 Reese, Laura A. 79, 80 regime politics 5, 45, 46 Regime Politics (Stone) 4, 45, 46, 53, 54 regime theory 13 Regional Convention Authority 274, 276n14

regionalism 108, 120 Regional Transit Authority 274 Reinsdorf, Jerry 131 relative costs 106 renewable energy infrastructure 297 rent prices 171–173, 336, 355 replacement vs. displacement 233, 335, 337 Republican National Convention (2016) 415 Request for Proposals 90, 91, 92 resident activism 279, 280, 283, 291, 292 resilience 257–261 “re-stating” theories of urban development 118–138; in Chicago 122–125; Chicago White Sox 125, 130–132; intergovernmental triad 122–125, 124; Navy Pier 125–126, 132–134; state government in urban research 120–121; World’s Fair (1992) 125, 128–130 Reynolds, Thomas, Jr. 131 Rice University 246 Richards, Ann 246 Riverhead Business Improvement District 167n48 Riverwalk 161 Rivlin, Alice 443 Roberts, Susan 262 Robson, Garry 337 Roebber, Paul 308 Roosevelt Avenue 377–379, 390, 394 Rose, D. 365 Rose, H. M. 353 Rouse, James 133, 134 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 449 Roy, Ananya 279 Rustbelt 113 Ryan, Brent 262, 269, 271, 273, 275 Ryan, George 135 Saakashvili, Mikheil 457 Salisbury R. H. 43, 44, 49n14; “new convergence of power” 43, 44, 49n14 Salter, Susanna 243 sanctuary cities 4, 194, 206 sanctuary city movement 194 Sanders, Bernie 185 San Diego 352, 358–361 Sands, Gary 79, 80 San Francisco 106, 161–162, 169, 176, 193, 194, 196–217, 315, 429;

challenges faced by immigrants 217; ethnoracial composition in 208, 212, 214; foreign-born population 197, 198, 199–201, 206, 210; government (see government of San Francisco); immigrant rights in 213–217; immigrants 196–198, 201; limited English proficient immigrants 202–203; low-wage immigrant workers 203–205; politics 196, 211, 214; postindustrial economy 204; undocumented immigrants 196, 205–207, 216–217 San Francisco Minimum Wage Ordinance 216 Santa Barbara 108 Sapotichne, Joshua 47 SARS-COV-2 396–398 Sassen, Saskia 452, 456 Savitch, H. V. 80 Sawyer, Eugene 133 Sayre, Wallace 11 Sbragia, A. M. 120 Schlichtman, John Joe 333 Schmidt, Joel 308, 309 Schneider, Nathan 180 Schneiderman, Eric T. 174 Scholz, Trebor 180 “school choice” movement 67, 147 school: expenditures 59; reforms 43 Schor, Juliet 169 Schuster, Wolfgang 450, 464n11 Seastead 457; Seastead Institute 457 Seattle 24–25, 44, 124, 315, 444 Second Circuit Court of Appeals 162 selective incentives 37, 110, 111 self-provisioning: definitions 283; limits, benefits and community groups in 291–292; moral geographies and ethical dilemmas 287–290; resurgence of 285–287; stewardship in urban gray space 283–285, 291; urbanism 259, 278–283 self-reinforcing processes 58, 59, 63–65 Self-Sufficient City Contest 458 semiskilled workers 28 Service Employees International Union (SEIU) 44 service infrastructure 4, 25, 28

476  Index Shackelford, Lottie H. 244 Share Better 174 sharing economy 146, 168–171, 173, 177, 179, 180 Shaw, Daron 10 Shelley v. Kraemer (1948) 151 Sheppard, Eleanor Parker 243 Shlay, A. B. 129 Shopping Center World 155 shopping malls 145, 146, 148–157, 159, 160, 163, 164 side payments 110, 111 Sidewalk Labs 86, 89–95, 96 Sidewalk Toronto 91–93 Sidney, Mara 58, 60 Silicon Valley 173, 177, 444 Simmel, G. 364; The Philosophy of Money 364 skilled labor 27, 28 Slater, T. 351, 352 Slaughter, Jera 301, 310 Slee, Tom 179 Small, Mario Luis 45 Smart, A. 55, 60, 81 Smith, Michael 227–228, 232 Smith, Neil 335, 364; New Urban Frontier 335 Smith, Sylvia 227–228, 232, 407, 417 Snyder, Rick 265 social distancing 378, 431 social injustice 333, 343, 351 social interactions 19, 22, 23 socialism 63–64 social mix 333, 344–346 social polarization 333, 375 social processes 54, 68, 69 social production model 55 social reconstruction 44–47 social sciences 52–55, 69 social scientific methods 7 social status 24 sociology 52, 53, 70 Soldier Field 130 Southdale Center 154 Southeast Asian Community Center 202 Southeast Michigan Council of Governments 266 South Street Seaport 161 sovereignty 452–454, 459, 462 spaces transformation 333, 334, 336, 347 special-purpose authorities 119, 121, 123, 125, 130, 134–137 Spirou, C. 122 State and Local Fiscal Recovery Funds 433

state-city relations 81, 120, 121, 123–125, 135, 137 state criminal trespass laws 151 state government 112, 118, 119, 120, 123–125, 134, 137; in urban research 120–121 State of the Cities report (2021) 432 Stockholm 108 Stoker, G. 135 Stone, Clarence 13, 53–55, 65, 66, 71, 79, 81, 135, 326 St. Peter’s Housing Committee 206, 210 stratification-economic system 24 Strom, E. 81 structural inequality 44, 45 suburban homes 23 suburbanization 266, 286 suburban office park 155–156 sufficientarian approach 339 Sugrue, Thomas 264, 266; The Origins of the Urban Crisis 264 Sunburnt Cities (Hollander) 258 sustainability 259, 261, 312–316, 318, 326, 329 sustainable cities 312 sustainable development: business influence 325–328, 327; cities and 312–314; concept of 311; environmental advocacy 314–317, 326, 327, 328; research design and findings 317–324 sustainable lifestyles 315 Swanstrom, T. 10 Tabb, David H. 11 tax: abatements 80, 84, 93, 95, 103, 115, 163; credits 103, 229, 230; incentives 80, 82, 86, 88, 93–97, 229, 286, 314; revenues 4, 29, 30, 92, 95, 125–126, 159, 163, 215 Taylor, Gladyse 226 Taylor, Matthew 463 Taylor, Michael 37 teachers unions 184, 185 territorial rights 343 territorial stigmatization 376, 408, 410, 418, 419 Texas 195, 240, 244, 246–252, 260, 294, 435, 437, 452 Texas State Directories 246 Thelen, K. 64–66, 68 theme parks 155, 157

Thomas, M. O. 121, 124 Thompson, James R. 122, 123, 125, 128–131, 133, 135, 136 ‘The Three Cities Within Toronto: Income Polarization Among Toronto’s Neighbourhoods, 1970– 2000’ (Hulchanski) 334 Tiebout, Charles 20–22 Tiedemann, R. 364 Tiger Stadium 273 Tilly, Charles 38 Toronto 86, 89–93, 95, 334, 340, 344 Toronto Community Housing Corporation (TCHC) 340 tourism 89, 101, 113, 126, 172 Towers at Zona Rosa 155 transaction cost economics 33 The Travel Industry Association of America (TIA) 153 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848) 198 tree-canopy cover 259–260 Trump, Donald 109, 185, 377, 381, 415, 426, 428; administration 185, 188, 194; campaign 427 Turner, Victor 220 Uccello, Antonina 243 U.N. Climate Summit 449 undocumented immigrants 194, 379 unemployment 9, 25, 28, 29, 39, 82, 171, 265, 278, 286, 291, 394, 408, 411, 415 United Air Lines 101 United Nations 451, 458 United Nations Population Fund 463n3 United Nations’ World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED) 311 United Sherpa Association 394 United States District Court 162 United States Federal Housing Administration (FHA) 238n13 United States Geological Survey 307 unskilled labor 28 Urban Affairs Association 53–54 Urban Affairs Review 6, 53 urban centers 145, 193–195 urban crisis 7, 42; postwar 57 urban death 263

Index  477 urban development 137; markets and public control of 103; political control of 115–116; popular-control systems and 108–111; state intervention and 111–115 urban economic development 4, 79–83, 104; Amazon’s HQ2 86–88; policies 97; policy trends 84–86; review 93–95; Sidewalk Toronto’s Quayside 86, 89–93 urban education 121 urban governance 53, 55–57, 59, 64, 65, 71, 79, 81 urban government 20, 137, 300, 314 Urban Health Equity in All Policies strategy 399 urban heat crisis 294, 295, 298 urban heat islands 259, 295–296 Urban Innovation Institute 91 urbanism 62 urbanization 280, 373, 456, 463n3 Urban Land Institute 133, 138n5, 139n14 urban planning 111, 112, 262, 287 urban policies 20, 66, 443 urban political analysis 3–6, 52–71; continuity and change 64–68; “historic turn” in 5; methods 68–69; path dependence 55–61; timing and sequence 61–64 urban political order 5; as framework for cross-time comparison 45–47; as refinement to regime analysis 41–44 urban redevelopment 11, 57, 64, 215 urban redistribution 214–216 urban reform movements 61 urban regime 32–47, 57, 66, 69, 70; Atlanta, structuring in 39–41; defining 35; structure, action, and structuring 38–39; study of 37, 47;

theory 55, 65, 121, 135; urban political order and 41–47 urban renewal 215; funds 81; legislation 63; politics 104 urban tree cover 298 U.S. Census Bureau 434, 444 U.S. Constitution: Fifth Amendment 151; First Amendment 149–152, 158; Fourteenth Amendment 149 U.S. Defense Department 268 U.S. Department of Education 188 U.S. Supreme Court 145, 146, 149–153, 156, 162, 216 Valdini, Melody 11 Valley, Tyrone 307–309 Vancouver 108, 344 Vergara, Camilo José 269 Veteran’s Administration 10 Vicari, S. 110 Vietnam War 52 Villiers West 91 Virginia 101 voting rights 61; women 241, 243 Wacquant, L. 418 wage laws 28, 163 Walks, Alan 344, 345 Wall Street BID 163 War on Drugs 42 Warren, Elizabeth 185 Washington, D.C. 186, 263, 436, 443, 452 Washington, Harold 122, 128–131, 133, 136 Washington Post 146 Washington State Public Stadium Authority (WSPSA) 124 Waterfront Toronto 89–93, 95 Watson, Cheryl 309, 310 Wayne State University 258 WE ACT 296 Weber, Max 24, 27, 456 Welch, Susan 11 West Edmonton Mall 153 Western Europe 108, 110–112

West Virginia vs. EPA 298 White, Dan 211 white-collar workers 28 White Sox stadium 125, 130–132, 136, 138n9 white supremacy 410, 417–419 Whitmire, Kathy 240 Who Governs? (Dahl) 53 Wiebe, Robert 36 Williams, Anthony 443 Williams, Derek 415 Williamson, Oliver 33 Wilson, Charles 104 Wilson, James 7 Wilson, J. O. 412, 416 “Window on the Future” report 133 Wolfe, Michelle 47 women: of color 195; in politics 240–243; violence against 195; see also female mayors Wong, Janelle 10 Woodward Corridor 270 workers layoff 170 work from home 375, 404 working class 61, 115, 227, 228, 266, 274, 285, 295, 310, 334–336, 341, 344, 345, 350 World Congress (2010) 449 world economy 26, 42, 53, 204, 257, 410, 443, 451, 456, 459 World Health Organization 399 World Mayors Summit on Climate 449 World’s Fair Authority (WFA) 122, 128–130, 132, 137, 139n10 World’s Fair project (1992) 125, 128–130, 136, 137, 138n9 World War I 267 World War II 39, 40, 42, 44, 53, 63, 66, 196, 267, 413, 444 Wrigley Field 138 Wylie, David 461 Young, Coleman 113, 266, 268 Young, I.M. 346 zoning laws 27, 28, 280 Zukin, S. 353