Through the eighties: reversing decline

The feds completed their simultaneous pullback from sub-state economic development while locking into place a more sustainable, and productive, federal role. Carter and Reagan, from opposite sides of the fence, solidified a federal presence in workforce (JTPA), redevelopment (UDAG), multi-faceted SBA, a new Section 8 HUD-housing policy, Brownfields, foreign trade, IRB and new initiatives in manufacturing and innovation. During the early 1980s an explosion of sub-municipal EDOs occurred throughout the nation. From business improvement districts to Main Street to tax increment financing districts (testifying to the national diffusion of TIF) to state-empowered economic development zones, these new EDOs jointed the literally hundreds (if not thousands) of CDCs operating on the sub-municipal level. They brought into economic and community development a host of new programs, tools and even strategies (economic gardening). In the meantime, former Big Cities fought back under charismatic mayors who used economic development as a primary strategy to stabilize Big Cities. Embracing a redefined physical redevelopment, they refunctioned the central city with festival marketplaces, waterfront revitalization, reinvigorated convention and tourism facilities, sports stadiums and economic development zones. By the eighties’ end, former Big Cities had worked themselves out of fiscal collapse and were on the threshold of a modest comeback. Charismatic mayors also took advantage of new community development initiatives such as Nehemiah housing, and innovative neighborhood-based revitalization such as the Harlem Children’s Zone and Boston’s Dudley Street demonstrated the potential power of neighborhood-based initiatives. To be fair, however, there were failures—such as Baltimore’s Sandtown. But, whatever the good news, the northern and midwestern metro areas lost the ability to influence their suburban neighbors. A de facto polycentric metropolitan area had developed, sufficiently strong to generate its own growth and repel central city-focused regionalism efforts. Former Big City states were not alone in the development of a polycentric suburbia; the West and South, characterized more by simultaneous suburbanization, had also matured into multi-nuclear metropolitan areas. A new “post-suburbia†had formed, every bit as diversified and varied as any Big City had been. Variety was post-suburbia’s middle name, with suburbs of all types, compositions, jurisdictional economic bases and functions scattered within each metro area. Diversified racially and increasingly class-diversified Post-suburbia no longer fit its stereotypes (if it ever did). Moreover, economically autonomous boomburbs and growing edge cities bore witness to the still-growing post-suburbia as new master-planned cities like Irvine California, our case study Woodlands Texas and new urbanist and retirement city-building. Labeled as “Privatopia,†new forms of housing, new concepts in self-governance and new forms of financing made post-suburbia affordable to many.