Urbanism and Its End

THE INSTITUTION FOR SOCIAL AND POLICY STUDIES AT YALE UNIVERSITY THE YALE ISPS SERIES DOUGLAS W. RAE CITYURBANISM AND ITS END YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS • NEW HAVEN AND LONDON Frontispiece: Construction workers posing for an on-the-job portrait during urban renewal’s Church Street Project, c. 1963. NHCHS. Copyright © 2003 by Yale University. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Unless otherwise specifically noted, all photographs are by permission of the New Haven Colony Historical Society (NHCHS). All rights reserved. Designed by Nancy Ovedovitz and set in Scala type by The Composing Room of Michigan, Inc. Printed in the United States of America by R. R. Donnelley, Harrisonburg, Virginia. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Rae, Douglas W. City : urbanism and its end / Douglas W. Rae. p. cm. — (Yale ISPS series) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-300-09577-5 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. New Haven (Conn.)—Politics and government—20th century. 2. New Haven (Conn.)—Economic conditions—20th century. 3. New Haven (Conn.)—Social conditions—20th century. 4. City and town life—Connecticut—New Haven—History—20th century. 5. Industrialization—Social aspects—Connecticut—New Haven— History—20th century. 6. Urban renewal—Connecticut—New Haven—History—20th century. I. Title. II. Series. F104.N657R34 2003 974.6؅8043—dc21 2003009974 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. 10987654321 For my favorite citizens of New Haven: Ellen, Hugh, Katie, Kim, and their families, even as they stray to the canyons of Manhattan and Colorado, and even into the swamplands of New Jersey and Cambridge The trust of a city street is formed over time from many, many little public sidewalk contacts. It grows out of people stopping by at the bar for a beer, getting advice from the grocer and giving advice to the newsstand man, comparing opinions with other customers at the bakery and nodding hello to the two boys drinking pop on the stoop, eyeing the girls while waiting to be called for dinner, admonishing the children, hearing about a job from the hardware man and borrowing a dollar from the druggist, admiring the new babies and sympathizing over the way a coat faded. Customs vary: in some neighborhoods people compare notes on their dogs; in others they compare notes on their landlords. Most of it is ostensibly utterly trivial but the sum is not trivial at all. The sum of such casual, public contact at a local level—most of it fortuitous, most of it associated with errands, all of it metered by the person concerned and not thrust upon him by anyone—is a feeling for the public identity of people, a web of public respect and trust, and a resource in time of personal or neighborhood need. The absence of this trust is a disaster to a city street. Its cultivation cannot be institutionalized. Jane Jacobs, 1961 CONTENTS Preface, ix 1 Creative Destruction and the Age of Urbanism, 1 PART ONE / URBANISM 2 Industrial Convergence on a New England Town, 35 3 Fabric of Enterprise, 73 4 Living Local, 113 5 Civic Density, 141 6 A Sidewalk Republic, 183 PART TWO / END OF URBANISM 7 Business and Civic Erosion, 1917–1950, 215 CONTENTS 8 Race, Place, and the Emergence of Spatial Hierarchy, 254 9 Inventing Dick Lee, 287 10 Extraordinary Politics: Dick Lee, Urban Renewal, and the End of Urbanism, 312 11 The End of Urbanism, 361 12 A City After Urbanism, 393 Notes, 433 Bibliography, 477 Acknowledgments, 499 Index, 503 viii PREFACE City: Urbanism and Its End pursues the course of urban history across the boundaries that separate political science from sociology, geography, economics, and history itself. The book’s origin, however, goes back to a collision between academic political science and the actual politics of one city. In January 1990, I left the chairmanship of the Yale political science department to become chief ad- ministrative officer (CAO) of the city of New Haven, Connecticut, under its first African-American mayor, John Daniels. Over the eighteen months spent in that job, I came to see the city in a more complicated way than before. I was often, in fact, puzzled by the oddness of fit between my thoughts on urban politics and power, and the things I found myself doing from day to day. Dazed by the rush of work, I had no time to theorize about the city while I was working for it. On my return to Yale in the fall of 1991, I began trying to make sense of my experience in City Hall. I had spent two decades as a colleague of Robert Dahl, whose Who Governs? was the best known-work on the subject. In that justly famous book, Dahl had focused on the control of city government decisions. He had concluded that power, under- stood as control over those decisions, was widely shared among different groups. Moreover, he elegantly described a historical “transition from the old pattern of oligarchy based on cumulative inequalities to a new pattern based upon dispersed inequalities.” Raymond Wolfinger’s Politics of Progress, based on direct observa- ix PREFACE tion during the administration of Mayor Richard C. Lee, deepened and (mostly) confirmed Dahl’s analysis. Along with Nelson Polsby’s book on community power studies, Community Power and Political Theory, this body of work came to be known as pluralism, or the pluralist school. I was familiar with the elaborate methodological and often ideological debate surrounding this work, and I had contributed modestly to the confusion with one paper of my own.1 The irresistible fact, which came into focus very slowly for me, was that city government is itself a weak player in a larger system of power.2 The problems faced by city officials have to do with making the most of the city’s small (and fragile) power base in dealing with players as varied as airline schedulers, street- corner entrepreneurs, union leaders, neighborhood potentates, racial spokesmen, bond rating agencies, bankers, public housing tenant leaders, criminal gangs, real estate developers, insurance underwriters, and government agencies at state and federal levels. Even “forces” as ineffable as popular culture—from its veneration of green lawns on quiet streets to its hypnotic fascination with firearms—form part of the power environment in which city government must operate. City decisions that work effectively in any but the most trivial cases are explicitly or implicitly complemented and supported by decisions taken outside City Hall.3 The interesting questions in local government all therefore turn on chains of decisions outside the confines of City Hall. If ever there was a moment to reinforce the weakness of city government, it oc- curred in the early months of 1990 in New Haven. The city had elected its first black mayor precisely when it was experiencing its worst fiscal crisis since the 1930s. By the time John Daniels was sworn in, something like a $20 million hole had appeared in the city budget, helping to explain the decision by incumbent Bi- agio DiLieto not to seek reelection the previous fall. A regional recession was also in progress, making it even more difficult to make ends meet in city government. Crime, and the fear of crime, were two problems, not just one problem—and both were out of control. By my third week as CAO it was clear that several hun- dred city workers would have to be laid off unless we could obtain remarkable concessions from at least four distinct unions that represented parts of our four- thousand-person workforce. Several top union spokesmen were intransigent, and many of the leaders showed considerable indifference to the fates of (very ju- nior, often black or Hispanic) people who would lose their jobs in a layoff under the unions’ seniority rules. Layoffs were no threat to senior leadership, and we thus had to carry some of them out. Meanwhile, overtime spending was running hundreds of thousands of dollars above budget. Restricting overtime spending was made difficult by an accumulation of work rules designed to protect oppor- x PREFACE tunities for overtime: many workers had home mortgages based on incomes with thousands of dollars in overtime built in. My responsibilities included oper- ations in mainline departments—police, fire, public works, parks, libraries— and budgetary control for those, plus education. With a record high rate of vio- lent crime, and an administration committed to improved (and labor-intensive) community-based police services, it was hard to press down on that large budget. In the case of education, where enrollment-driven state mandates for spending were a fact of life, we failed at first even to cut the rate of increase in spending. When I hinted at the idea of diminished fire facilities, a former mayor called the next day at 6 a.m., quoted the local paper’s account of my idea, and advised bluntly: “Don’t fuck with my firehouses, Doug, my boy.” For related reasons, spending on parks and public works was almost as hard to cut deeply. The work was better than any diet for my corpulent midsection: in the first six months of the job I lost forty pounds, yet the city achieved only a modest reduction in its spending.

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