Urban Neighborhoods in a New Era: Revitalization Politics in the Postindustrial City

By Clarence N. Stone, Robert P. Stoker, John Betancur and 9 more

For decades, North American cities racked by deindustrialization and population loss have followed one primary path in their attempts at revitalization: a focus on economic growth in downtown and business areas. Neighborhoods, meanwhile, have often been left severely underserved. There are, however, signs of change. This collection of studies by a distinguished group of political scientists and urban planning scholars offers a rich analysis of the scope, potential, and ramifications of a shift still in progress. Focusing on neighborhoods in six cities—Baltimore, Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Toronto—the authors show how key players, including politicians and philanthropic organizations, are beginning to see economic growth and neighborhood improvement as complementary goals. The heads of universities and hospitals in central locations also find themselves facing newly defined realities, adding to the fluidity of a new political landscape even as structural inequalities exert a continuing influence.

While not denying the hurdles that community revitalization still faces, the contributors ultimately put forth a strong case that a more hospitable local milieu can be created for making neighborhood policy. In examining the course of experiences from an earlier period of redevelopment to the present postindustrial city, this book opens a window on a complex process of political change and possibility for reform.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Sep 18, 2015
• ISBN: 9780226289151

Book preview

Urban Neighborhoods in a New Era

Urban Neighborhoods in a New Era

Revitalization Politics in the Postindustrial City

Clarence N. Stone and Robert P. Stoker

John Betancur, Susan E. Clarke, Marilyn Dantico, Martin Horak, Karen Mossberger, Juliet Musso, Jefferey M. Sellers, Ellen Shiau, Harold Wolman, and Donn Worgs

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago & London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2015 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2015.

Printed in the United States of America

24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978–0-226–28896–3 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978–0-226–28901–4 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978–0-226–28915–1 (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226289151.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Stone, Clarence N. (Clarence Nathan), 1935– author.

Urban neighborhoods in a new era : revitalization politics in the postindustrial city / Clarence N. Stone and Robert P. Stoker [and 10 others].

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-226-28896-3 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-226-28901-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-226-28915-1 (ebook) 1. Neighborhoods— United States. 2. Urban renewal—United States. I. Stoker, Robert Phillip, 1954– author. II. Title.

HT123S7845 2015

307.3′362160973—dc23

2014047165

♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents

List of Tables

Preface, by Clarence N. Stone

List of Abbreviations

ONE Change Afoot

MARTIN HORAK, JULIET MUSSO, ELLEN SHIAU, ROBERT P. STOKER, AND CLARENCE N. STONE

TWO Contexts for Neighborhood Revitalization: A Comparative Overview

HAROLD WOLMAN AND MARTIN HORAK, WITH THE ASSISTANCE OF CAMILLE A. SOLA AND DIANA HINCAPIE

THREE Neighborhood Policy in Baltimore: The Postindustrial Turn

ROBERT P. STOKER, CLARENCE N. STONE, AND DONN WORGS

FOUR Standing in Two Worlds: Neighborhood Policy, the Civic Arena, and Ward-Based Politics in Chicago

JOHN BETANCUR, KAREN MOSSBERGER, AND YUE ZHANG

FIVE Professionalized Government: Institutionalizing the New Politics in Phoenix

MARILYN DANTICO AND JAMES SVARA

SIX City Fragmentation and Neighborhood Connections: The Political Dynamics of Community Revitalization in Los Angeles

ELLEN SHIAU, JULIET MUSSO, AND JEFFEREY M. SELLERS

SEVEN The New Politics in a Postindustrial City: Intersecting Policies in Denver

SUSAN E. CLARKE

EIGHT Policy Shift without Institutional Change: The Precarious Place of Neighborhood Revitalization in Toronto

MARTIN HORAK AND AARON ALEXANDER MOORE

NINE Contending with Structural Inequality in a New Era

ROBERT P. STOKER, CLARENCE N. STONE, AND MARTIN HORAK

References

List of Coauthors

Index

Tables

Preface

My first venture into studying urban neighborhoods culminated in a book titled Economic Growth and Neighborhood Discontent (Stone 1976). It was about reshaping Atlanta from a rail-centered city to a place in a burgeoning automotive age. My Atlanta study was part of a wave of neighborhood studies, some looking internally to the features of urban neighborhoods, particularly those less well-off, and others paying special attention to the rise of neighborhood protests and, as in Atlanta, conflict between less prosperous neighborhoods and established power centers. The recurring narrative was about a largely localized neighborhood movement that scored scattered victories but was mainly positioned to wage occasional defensive battles with little capacity for affecting agendas over the long term.

In the years following World War II, the overarching consideration for city leaders, political and economic, was redevelopment. They saw remaking the central business district as their top priority. Other changes were under way, principally a black political mobilization, but city leaders had their policy eyes mainly on redevelopment—and through the federal highway and urban-renewal programs there was ample federal money to back this effort.

Whether labeled as such or not, many of these early works were studies of power. Notwithstanding the fact that nonaffluent neighborhoods did not lose all the battles, these studies described struggles between unequal contenders. The playing field was tilted heavily against less-well-off neighborhoods, and even when such neighborhoods survived, many came through this time bearing the marks of social and economic damage. Now we are in a different time, but scars from the past remain.

In contrast with accounts of the earlier era of redevelopment, this book identifies a basic shift through which relationships have become more fluid and policymaking more open-ended. Seen from a neighborhood perspective, new players, fresh issues, in some instances modified political-governmental arrangements, and a transformed context distinguish the present from earlier times. Whereas the post–World War II years accorded economic development a privileged place, the current period allows for some mixing of economic-development aims with community-based concerns. The terms of this mix are negotiable, and the line between what favors economic development and what attends to community concerns has become increasingly fuzzy. Power is less and less a showdown between clearly differentiated antagonists and more a matter of how policy issues are framed, albeit accommodations are sometimes far from amicable.

Not to be overlooked is that poverty persists, neighborhood distress remains a highly visible feature of the urban landscape, and cities are at the center of contemporary inequality. Positive-sounding initiatives abound, but rarely do urban programs live up to the high expectations and incautious rhetoric that surround their launch. Still, historian Michael Katz (2011) questions the dominance in urban scholarship of what he terms the narrative of failure. He calls for a counternarrative while adding that the temptation to jettison the narrative of urban failure in favor of a story based on progress and hope must be resisted (2011, 159). In line with Katz’s caution, the authors of this book see an array of incomplete steps and initiatives that have fallen short. But we also find significant accomplishments and many moves that make a difference to those who live in areas of disadvantage. While distressed neighborhoods seldom, if ever, get preferred treatment, they no longer suffer the nearly total disregard they once incurred.

Over time, understanding has grown that neighborhoods and their treatment are interwoven with other policies in the city: particularly transportation, order maintenance, and the pursuit of economic growth. There may have been a time—under Model Cities, for instance—when elite actors treated neighborhood policy as a differentiated arena to be operated separately and kept distinct from the economic-development agenda, but in the present era such policy thinking has largely faded away. Now neighborhood issues are often linked to broader city aims of growth and development, with public safety a continuing consideration as well.

Since this book identifies the emergence of a new era of neighborhood politics, perhaps not yet widely recognized, it seems in order to explain how the research unfolded and the theme for this book emerged. The present work grew out of an invitation from the Rockefeller Foundation to its Conference Center in Bellagio, Italy, to conduct a workshop on policy efforts to address distressed urban neighborhoods. The resulting Regenerating Urban Neighborhoods (RUN) project spawned by that workshop featured a two-part follow-up: a European wing and a North American wing. This book is a product of the latter, and it consists of six case studies covering Baltimore, Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, and Phoenix in the United States and the Canadian city of Toronto. The six cities vary in size, but all are large and all are the central cities of metropolitan regions. They represent no sampling procedure but do cover a variety of political-governmental forms and socioeconomic conditions. The workshop chose to work from the ground up, with a focus on distressed neighborhoods as policy targets.

We decided on this focus not because we regarded the global economy as unimportant or systems of intergovernmental relations as inconsequential, but because we wanted to view these forces from the perspective and actions of local players. We took a cue from Arthur Stinchcombe, who cautions about a generalizing impulse among social scientists—an impulse, he argues, that attaches itself most easily to the anatomy and physiology of social structures. Structures may emerge, Stinchcombe says, but the place to start is at a less abstract level with people defining problems and trying to work their way out of them (1978, 121).

In this study, as we sought to refine findings, we came face-to-face with the insistent reality of a shift. It grew and took shape from many particulars, cumulating into what we came to recognize as a new era for neighborhood politics. Although structural inequality remains a key feature of neighborhood politics, the new era has seen the kind of unrelenting zero-sum approach once so prevalent give way to a more contingency-filled outlook. Aiding a distressed neighborhood is no longer seen as necessarily ill-conceived redistribution; it might be part of a policy mix that yields widely shared benefits. Zero-sum calculations have by no means disappeared, but they don’t necessarily crowd out other ways of thinking and acting.

The shift we found was deduced, not from a grand theory, but from viewing the perspectives and actions of local players. How did they understand neighborhood distress, what level of priority did they attach to the revitalization of neighborhoods displaying signs of decline, and what actions did they take (initiate, contend over, implement, and modify)? What lessons did they learn and act on? Our approach involved city-level studies covering (1) who the players are whose actions impinge fairly directly on neighborhood conditions; (2) which issues and policy ideas they took up; (3) through what arrangements policy decisions were made and implemented; and (4) what patterns of policy intervention took shape. Interviews, documents, and news accounts were our sources, the flow of events a guiding thread.

In looking at neighborhood distress, the Bellagio workshop defined a policy intervention by three qualifying characteristics: (1) that it be intentional and not purely incidental to some other action; (2) that it cover more than a single functional area of policy—for instance, increased policing by itself would not be sufficient; and (3) that it be distinguished from established operations by an allocation of additional resources—coordination of existing services alone would fall short. Beyond this, since a neighborhood involves people and not just space, total replacement of low- and moderate-income residents with those who were well-off was ruled out as a revitalization policy. For instance, we did not regard promotion of unmitigated gentrification as neighborhood regeneration. Rather, it seemed more an antineighborhood policy. A blend of some gentrification with improvement for long-term residents is on occasion a sought-after revitalization end, but rarely is it one that leaves everybody happy. Policy moves can be mixed in both motivation and consequence.

We consistently observed city actors struggling with two recurring lines of friction. One is the issue of displacement. Elite policy actors tend to favor greater displacement; neighborhood residents generally want less. The second line of friction is over physical improvement versus enhanced services. In this instance, elite actors tend to emphasize physical change, while residents often voice a need for greater services. People in distressed neighborhoods typically have a variety of community concerns, ranging from more effective policing to better schools. Residents especially favor more programs for youth, and community concerns can extend to such matters as more extensive and more accessible drug treatment. Employment and job training often rank high among community concerns, and more wide-ranging retail offerings occupy a place as well.

Physical improvement may appeal to mayors and other top officials in part because it carries the hope that a onetime expenditure fixes the problem. More grounded in immediate circumstances, residents may see physical conditions as a symptom, not an underlying cause, and cost containment is not their major concern. The two lines of friction can easily come together and heighten conflict. Seen narrowly in these terms, neighborhood policy and politics have a potential to turn into a zero-sum game in which elite actors hold the trump cards while residents in disadvantaged communities always lose. That was the typical urban-redevelopment scenario of yesteryear. Unrelenting, structural inequalities promise no other outcome. Does the present time differ from an earlier time when broad structural forces seemed to be close to determinative? This book gives evidence of a shift toward a new, more open-ended era of neighborhood politics.

With special urging from Jefferey Sellers, the Bellagio workshop recognized from the start that it was important to avoid viewing neighborhood policy and politics as static phenomena but instead to see them as part of a trajectory. Thus, although in the workshop our main concern was the contemporary politics of neighborhood regeneration, we understood that historical background and the political legacies of cities entered the analysis. History matters.

The workshop started with a relatively simple model: socioeconomic conditions as a source of problems and challenges, along with political and policy legacies and how they are understood by current players, how policies are framed as responses to problems and challenges, and then how political-governmental arrangements filter policy solutions and yield policy outcomes. Our initial aim was to use cross-city comparisons to identify those key political-governmental arrangements in interaction with socioeconomic conditions that generated more robust policy interventions. But (apologies to Robert Burns) the best-laid plans gang aft a-gley. We found particular differences among the six North American cities, but in many instances they were not large. Neighborhood revitalization policy was a significant presence in all six cities, but in none did it enjoy sustained standing as a matter of high priority. However, we pondered whether there was something more far-reaching at work. As research progressed, the fate of discrete policy initiatives was woven into history-informed patterns in policymaking, in the evolution of ideas about policy intersects, and in changed thinking about what could and should be brought together. The initial model was useful in organizing research but of limited value in capturing the big picture. Trajectory took on enlarged weight as a guide to interpreting findings, and feedback became part of the results considered.

The six cases pointed to a shared shift from an old to a new pattern of policy and politics. The shift was substantial enough to warrant a claim that a new era was giving rise to a discernible new politics. Of course, city policy initiatives are not an isolated phenomenon but draw from a discourse of ideas and puzzles exchanged not only among local players but also between local and national (and sometimes international) policy actors. Many historians incline toward looking at convergent forces, and that is an inclination this book shares. Issues, ideas, players, policy practices, political and governing arrangements—all tend to flow together (but not necessarily smoothly) as waves of change.

While cross-city differences remain part of RUN’s overall analysis, the process of working through our cases and their wider environment gave heightened appreciation of an insight from Robert Salisbury about comparison over time. In his urban classic on the new convergence of power, Salisbury offered: By viewing the city historically a number of elements, particularly those which have changed, can be seen more clearly than if a more strictly contemporaneous study were made (1964, 777). By viewing current policy for distressed neighborhoods as part of a trajectory, we could see that a cross-time framework was useful.

In the years following World War II, city leaders were caught up in a need to cope with a declining industrial order. Faced with deep-running economic change, city leaders saw themselves in a race with time (Lowe 1967), and in many places political and business leaders came together and created arrangements to pursue economic growth and, as much as possible, keep it uncluttered by other concerns. Nonaffluent neighborhoods were typically an afterthought or simply viewed as a source of blight. When spatially clustered social problems became increasingly hard to ignore, the response by established power centers was to keep growth policy separate and give it special standing, a pattern that can be seen in Sun Belt and Frost Belt cities alike. With the arrival of Great Society programs, community concerns were sometimes taken up, but essentially as a differentiated and distinctly secondary arena.

How did this older policy period give way to the present period of postindustrialism? What changed to lay the groundwork for a shift in practices? Postindustrialism is usually linked directly to characteristics of the world economy, specifically the rise of the information age and the ascendance of increasingly formal knowledge. In this book we look more at the offshoots of such an economy. Today’s policy actors are caught between the stubbornness of inequality and a case for social inclusion (e.g., all children can learn).

A complex postindustrial context has loosened the reins on established practices, and fresh approaches have emerged. Thus, seeing politics in the large over time can reveal things that might not be evident bit by bit. A myriad of specifics, perhaps deemed inconsequential when viewed one by one, show a pattern when aggregated. Community and social concerns have gained greater salience. Urban economists, such as Edward Glaeser (2011), stress the importance of human capital.

Yet neighborhood distress has continuity across time as an ongoing spatial expression of socioeconomic inequality. Even though the nation’s racial order is undergoing change (Hochschild, Weaver, and Burch 2012), stereotyping of neighborhoods endures and has spatial impacts (Sampson 2012). Income disparities not only persist but have deepened (Hacker, Mettler, and Soss 2007). Amelioration of neighborhood distress remains, then, as a policy challenge even as social and economic changes continue to unfold. Are the policy responses to neighborhoods really so different today from what they were in the past? If so, how and why?

Although the long-standing imperative of economic growth has by no means vanished, it has been amended in a way that has implications for efforts to revitalize distressed neighborhoods. The scope and character of this amending are part of what this book explores; this book is a response to a growing but uneven recognition that economic development and community-based concerns often cannot be handily separated. Indeed, it seems that city actors cannot devote policy attention to the economic realm without engaging the social realm as well. Policy realities are intermingled. Moreover, many city leaders, while attempting to concentrate on economic growth, learned over time that public safety and neighborhood alienation are not matters that can be ignored without consequences.

What fostered a change in thinking? At one level such change can be said to come out of the transition from industrial to postindustrial society. However, Urban Neighborhoods in a New Era embodies no ambition to advance an encompassing theory of urban political change. Instead, it was conceived to stay close to the flow of events and how, in Stinchcombe manner, these events reflect the way things look to participants. In line with important work in American political development, this approach avoids highly abstract speculation and aims more for proximate causation. Further, the new-era shift is best seen as something that is taking hold gradually, bit by bit, and not the product of a holistic, functionally driven adaptation to a changing context. It is piecemeal, uneven, and cumulative more than punctuated. Still, over time convergence is observable, and in an overview of the decades following World War II, one can see an emerging tilt from a narrow preoccupation with land use toward greater concern with people. Consider the following as instances in which nonaffluent people began to command more attention:

• Population gain or loss became a matter about which city policymakers grew increasingly concerned, and they saw trends as derived from more than economic growth.

• Concentrated poverty emerged as a concern, and city leaders came to see it as a condition that aggravates a range of problems.

• Although street crime and disorder concentrate in poor areas, they are nevertheless city problems. And for some urban actors, the prevalence of violence among youth became a moral concern. A worsening crack epidemic made the issue especially pressing in the latter years of the twentieth century.

• As A Nation at Risk (National Commission on Excellence in Education 1983) highlighted, schools assumed heightened importance in the postindustrial age and its knowledge economy. Many officials and civic leaders saw that a city’s long-range economic health is linked to the performance of its education system.

As the people dimension grew through such specifics, the pursuit of economic growth was put in a different light. What had once been an urgent task of saving the city by refashioning the central business district morphed into a more complex undertaking as policy elites began to see that economic aspirations and community problems could not be neatly separated. Change came about, but not because these new themes prompted a sudden conversion from the old way of thinking. Realities gradually built awareness that a city’s economic and social conditions are connected. Still, details matter in how this connection is perceived and handled. Accordingly, the policy domain of distressed neighborhoods is now populated with players and practices not prominent when downtown-centered redevelopment reigned as the distinct action priority for cities. It is the intertwining of economic development with social and community concerns that has become the terrain of the emerging politics of neighborhood revitalization. It is a terrain of struggle, conflict, and misunderstanding as well as a terrain in which positive-sum outcomes can sometimes be brought about. Bargaining and negotiation are possible but can come to a halt if distrust intrudes.

Change continues, but the past figures in through the collateral social damage that went along with massive redevelopment. A legacy of social disruption and neglect is part of the distress that many neighborhoods now confront. As Mary Pattillo observes of Chicago’s experience, the ghost of urban renewal is always present (2007, 8).

The new neighborhood politics emerging in postindustrial cities thus partly involves a process of awakening—of discovering that a crack epidemic had to be confronted, that urban schools needed to be turned around, that severely distressed public-housing projects required attention, that concentrated poverty has far-reaching consequences, that residential disinvestment and neglect can spread and bring down adjoining areas, and that urban universities, hospitals, and medical schools could benefit from a more constructive relationship with their neighbors.

Awakening can be incomplete, and it has not brought with it ready-made and adequately supplied capacities to respond. Hence, neighborhood politics in the postindustrial city involves a scramble to assemble resources in a period of great scarcity. And a new stage of policy thinking has not precluded conflict and weltering tensions. With the winds of inequality undiminished, the particulars of pursuing the social reconstruction of cities are often contested.

The city is a place of inequalities, manifest most visibly at the neighborhood level in clusters of residential distress. This distress is most conspicuous when properties are run-down, neglected, and, in the worst cases, pocked with abandonment. Distress, however, has other manifestations—crime and social disorder, environmental hazards, inferior services, political impotence, and profound alienation. A challenge for scholars is how to frame their work so that—as put by Michael Katz—they are neither Cassandra nor Pollyanna. The narrative of failure is deeply entrenched but should not prevent us from seeing that social-equity gains can be real.

While inequality has a structural foundation that city policies cannot topple, local actions can mitigate many of its consequences. Much of the theoretical work related to cities and their distressed neighborhoods either greatly underplays structural inequality or comes close to structural determinism. In the concluding chapter of this book, as findings are assessed, we aim for an often-missing middle ground and offer an approach that accepts structural inequality as a reality but rejects structural determinism.

Accordingly, we find that the current period of policymaking is more penetrable by neighborhood concerns than was the case in earlier times. In part this comes from new ways of thinking about city-neighborhood connections, new actors (with different views and concerns), and a change in inclination among community-based actors (from those once firmly rooted in a history of protest to those who show a cautious willingness to bargain for community benefits).

The follow-up step then becomes one of asking what may be learned by looking at varied experiences within the present context of the postindustrial city. What factors are of consequence? We find the institutionalization of neighborhood improvement policy to be of special significance, but there are other considerations. The challenges of alliance building are worth close attention. Structural inequality is very real, but the agency of residents in distressed neighborhoods, the context within which they pursue their aims, and the intermediate arrangements, mechanisms, and policy practices employed are also quite consequential. While structural inequality continues to take a toll, the concluding chapter of this book brings together particulars that suggest a departure from an urban narrative of failure. There is room for factors to come together in ways that advance neighborhood improvements.

A note about how this book was composed: In the conventional manner, the table of contents lists the authors for each chapter. This listing, however, misses a process in which a core group, listed on the title page of this volume, engaged in an ongoing interchange through a series of workshops, extended sessions of mealtime discussion, email exchanges, and ad hoc conversations to develop a shared understanding of this book project and how its parts fit together. Clarence N. Stone and Robert P. Stoker coordinated the final version of this shared task, but this book is thoroughly a multiauthored work. It has been a special pleasure to be part of this process.

—Clarence N. Stone

Abbreviations

One

Change Afoot

Martin Horak, Juliet Musso, Ellen Shiau, Robert P. Stoker, and Clarence N. Stone

The narrative of urban change in North American cities has most often focused on the business district with its office towers, luxury hotels, convention centers, festival marketplaces, and, frequently now, sports arenas. For many years neighborhoods bore the burden of change and received little in return. Secondary attention to aging neighborhoods underscored their neglect and political impotence. Except for predatory lending, housing finance sent its dollars mainly to the suburbs. Expressways ate chunks of inner-city land and in the process often created barriers to neighborhood-level travel, while the same multilane highways connected the business district with seemingly ever-extending suburbs. The poor, near poor, and other nonaffluent residents of the central city were thoroughly marginalized—displaced and disregarded, never part of the power-wielding body of insiders who set agendas, targeted investments, and guided the public discourse about the city’s future. In light of such a past, it may be tempting to embrace pessimism about the marginal status of distressed neighborhoods, but we see in recent trends the emergence of a different neighborhood narrative—one containing multiple possibilities, one not structurally foreordained to end in decline and despair. Still, perils to neighborhood well-being have by no means disappeared. The new narrative is about possibility, not an accomplished reversal of fortune.

In today’s highly mobile world, why focus on urban neighborhoods, particularly those in distress or danger of decline? The often-made claim to be a city of neighborhoods suggests that, although the business district may be the economic core, the quality of urban life is heavily residential in character. Without neighborhoods in the picture, research provides a truncated view of the city and its politics. Urban Neighborhoods in a New Era aims to correct this by highlighting residential neighborhoods, not as phenomena in and of themselves, but as part of a wider picture of city politics and policymaking.

Cities and their politics are not static phenomena. As conditions change, so also do motives and capacities to act. In its approach to political change, this book focuses on distressed urban neighborhoods. It differs from much work in urban politics in three ways:

1. Neighborhood policy, not revival of downtown, is the lens for viewing the politics of cities.

2. This neighborhood lens shows that an important shift in the political order of cities has occurred, and this shift makes some past characterizations of neighborhood politics increasingly problematic in the cities of today.

3. To better understand, and possibly improve, the political prospects of distressed neighborhoods, this book turns to a reform agenda that, while acknowledging structural inequality and its challenge, recognizes a role for political agency. It thus offers an alternative to a long-reigning narrative of urban-policy failure (cf. M. Katz 2011).

As cities have left the industrial age further and further behind, the narrow pursuit of economic development and growth as an overriding aim has been modified; the economic imperative has become less distinct and now intermingles with other considerations. We do not mean to suggest that the economic imperative has been displaced; to the contrary, growth remains a central local priority. However, economic development is no longer seen as a necessarily discrete and privileged domain. The intermingling of community-level concerns with economic development has become part of a new era in city politics. Neighborhood issues—such as fighting crime, educating children, putting youth on a constructive path into adulthood, boosting opportunities for gainful employment, and, yes, enhancing the general quality of residential life—are factors in economic growth even as economic growth itself continues to be seen as the sine qua non for city vitality.

In the new postindustrial geography, neighborhoods with market potential can readily become revitalization targets. Hence market processes are now seen as something not always tied tightly to the central business district (CBD). The new geography includes varied sites—especially those that feature anchors such as universities, medical schools, and hospitals. Access to mass transit stations has also risen in import, as has the nearby presence of parks and other recreational facilities (including those for nightlife). Desirable housing stock—whether because of its architecture, location, or both—is also a source of market potential. This is by no means to suggest that markets are always a positive force. To the contrary, many places continue to be plagued by disinvestment and its manifestation in abandoned properties, neglected upkeep, and scarce retail. A need to battle blight remains very much part of the neighborhood picture, but in some places the possibility of gentrification and its various ramifications exists too.

In a complex urban setting, all segments of the city share a common ecology. The CBD is affected in myriad direct and indirect ways by what happens in the residential areas that encircle it and vice versa. At the same time, economic growth, the fight against blight, and responsiveness to community concerns do not create a smooth fit. The mix is laden with tension, and conflict often surrounds the particulars. Community concerns often extend well beyond the narrow economic agenda that comes most readily to business elites. For their part, residents of distressed neighborhoods often emphasize public safety (especially containing violence among the young) and link this concern to a need for organized recreational activities. Prominent also are calls for maintaining adequate services, ranging from trash pickup and fixing potholes to drug treatment and aiding senior citizens who have limited family support.

Because there is nothing formulaic about the relationship between economic growth and neighborhood vitality, there is bound to be friction. In governing, policymakers are guided by neither a controlling consensus about the well-being of the city nor a technocratic calculation of the best path to follow. Instead, the concerns of distressed neighborhoods are inevitably part of a political process in which interests conflict and information is never complete. Short-term and immediate considerations often supersede broader and long-term views. Sundry motives come into play. Making a governing mesh from such fractious forces is the task of politics, and we examine this process in the belief that some versions of this mesh are better for improving neighborhood conditions than others. But before we draw any conclusions about how more hopeful trajectories of neighborhood policy might be forged and sustained, we need an understanding of what is happening at present.

We pursue this aim in multiple steps in this chapter. We first set the broad context for the six city narratives that come later in the book. This context is centered in a long-term shift from the redevelopment politics dominant in the years following World War II to the politics of today’s postindustrial city. The shift involves a decline in the cohesion and concentration of policymaking power at the elite level (in Robert Salisbury’s 1964 term, a convergence of power) and the rise of more diffuse patterns of policymaking. We next discuss how the new era of neighborhood politics took shape as gradual recognition of intensifying problems set the stage for fresh thinking about the interconnections between urban problems. As a result, neighborhoods experienced modest and limited gains as subjects of policy attention. We then discuss neighborhood distress and revitalization strategies. Although it has many components, we emphasize neighborhood distress as a political problem that tests a community’s capacity to engage in constructive problem solving. Finally, we sketch an analytic framework for political reform that encompasses both structural inequality and constrained political agency. The framework focuses analytic attention on the middle ground between structural determinism and free-ranging agency. Constraint derives significantly from a politics of interactions between highly unequal players: on one side is an upper stratum containing an assemblage of elite players with substantial resources, who often play a major part in agenda setting, and on the other side is a lower stratum of actors with limited resources and a history of being marginal players in urban politics.

A Major Shift

Our study of six North American cities bears evidence of an important change in the political position of distressed neighborhoods. Though far short of revolutionary proportions, change is afoot. When cities were in the early stage of transition away from the industrial era, progrowth coalitions placed economic development in a protected position, insulated it, and downplayed neighborhood problems and the collateral damage residents suffered as economic-development initiatives accelerated and amplified a socially