The sixties

This chapter dwells on the role played by the federal government in dramatically reshaping state and sub-state economic development. Starting with the experimentation by the Kennedy administration, the government ventured more deeply into depressed area-wide and workforce strategies in its brief tenure. A series of pilot programs by the Ford Foundation and then by the White House Commission on Juvenile Delinquency (chaired by Robert Kennedy) led to a path-breaking refocus of neighborhood-level community development. That refocus was included in LBJ’s 1964 War on Poverty and his later Great Society legislation. Such huge change, supplemented by ample federal monies and programs, came at a time when the Second Ghetto was ready to demand major change fast. The turbulent external environment and cohort generational change all came to a head when the War on Poverty’s community action programs were unveiled. In the meantime a huge, the greatest ever entry of the federal government into sub-state affairs, the Great Society, simply overwhelmed weakened Big City policy systems, diverted them from their suburban focus and redirected attention away from their jurisdictional economic base. New federal agencies such as OEO/HUD, ARA and EDA, plus a refocused SBA, served as launching pads for federal initiatives like the Model Cities and National Historic Preservation Act. The seemingly endless and violent urban riots that characterized these years, however, set a tone for politics and population mobility. Nixon was elected, and visible Big City suburbanization fueled his victory. Nixon institutionalized much of the Great Society while pulling back the feds by means of revenue sharing, reliance on states and block grants. He did, however, move into new policy areas with CERCLA and CETA—which established a strong role for the federal government in local pollution control and established a national workforce policy nexus. When this was mostly over, in 1974, the landscape of American economic development had changed forever. Gone for all practical purposes was urban renewal—and, for that matter, Big Cities. In their place were central city neighborhoods and autonomous and powerful suburbs.