Hegemonic Big Cities and the rising Sunbelt

This chapter is a series of case studies that contrast the implementation of urban renewal during the 1950s and 1960s. They vividly demonstrate its variety and the complexity of the policy systems that used this economic development strategy. They reveal what went wrong and, more importantly, what went right—in the West, where it was used (or not used) for an entirely different set of goals by an entirely different type of policy system. So the tale of Boston’s Mayor Collins and economic development’s first “czar,†Ed Logue, is related, followed by Philadelphia’s notably different policy system and its own urban renewal dynamics. Philadelphia sees the dramatic splitting off of a CBD-focused economic development from the initial planning leadership of one of planning’s greatest, Edmund Bacon. A separate set of EDOs followed, and the governmental branch of mainstream economic development had arrived on the 1950s scene. In the Sunbelt, starting with California urban renewal was used by central cities and suburbs—a consequence of the Sacramento Plan which refocused it away from slum clearance to tax-exempt bond issuance for Greenfield development. Called tax increment financing (TIF), with an empowered redevelopment agency, suburbs could go mall and sales tax chasing, and central cities could modernize their CBD as the East had done with the City Beautiful movement nearly a half-century previously. The case studies of Atlanta and Norfolk provide examples of southern urban renewal, which were mostly congruent with western City Beautiful, save for the role of chambers and the business community in coping with southern school desegregation—which emerges as the most important priority of southern economic development. Western CBD modernization is looked at through Oklahoma City, led by possibly the most “aggressive†economic developer ever, Stanley Draper; and San Diego’s urban renewal, the dog that didn’t bark, was (but not for lack of trying) entirely a private affair rather than governmental—again along City Beautiful lines.