©2017 Timothy D. MacKinnon ALL RIGHTS RESERVED CAPITOL NAVY YARD: A 21st CENTURY TRANSITION By TIMOTHY DAVID MACKINNON A dissertation submitted to the Graduate School-New Brunswick Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey In partial fulfillment of the requirements For the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Program in Planning and Public Policy Written under the direction of Frank Popper And approved by ___________________________________ ___________________________________ ___________________________________ ___________________________________ New Brunswick, New Jersey January, 2017 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Capitol Navy Yard: A 21st Century Transition By TIMOTHY D. MACKINNON Dissertation Director: Frank J. Popper This case study of government’s role in development in Washington D.C.’s Navy Yard neighborhood covers the time period 1995-2008 and utilizes multiple source types to answer its research questions. Newspaper articles and other media reports, archived data, official government statistics, visual evidence, and structured surveys are used to construct a granular, narrative timeline of the neighborhood’s transition. This narrative is used to analyze the case and explore the literature on government’s role in urban development in order to explore perceived gaps in the theory; which include 1) a monolithic understanding of “government,” 2) an over-reliance on a search for universal truths, 3) an embedded unit of analysis problem, and 4) the use of methods that are prone to selection bias during the evidence-compilation stage and subjective assessment in the analysis stage. Findings include the conclusions that 1) government matters, even in the era of the decentralized state, 2) urban development is messy, chaotic, unpredictable, contextual, and subject to coincidence and 3) that there is indeed, trouble in the body of urban development theory. ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS There are a number of people I would like to thank who helped me immensely along this long road. First and foremost, my family. My wife Sarah was an unflagging well of support, as were my children Ava and Seamus and my parents, David and Janice. Of course, my committee, Frank Popper, Briavel Holcomb, Karen O’Neill, and Justin Hollander. I would be remiss if I did not mention my 5th committee member and biggest cheerleader Marc Weiner, who was always on my side. There are too many other friends, colleagues, and family to note in this space, but I appreciate them all. Thank you so much. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION ................................................................................................... ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ................................................................................................................... iii TABLE OF CONTENTS....................................................................................................................... iv PREFACE ........................................................................................................................................... v INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................................................ 1 RESEARCH QUESTIONS................................................................................................................. 8 CHAPTER 1: LITERATURE REVIEW AND METHODS ........................................................................ 12 LITERATURE REVIEW .................................................................................................................. 12 METHODS ................................................................................................................................... 30 CHAPTER 2: CASE SETTING ............................................................................................................. 45 INTERNAL HISTORICAL CONTEXT ............................................................................................... 45 External Spatial Context ............................................................................................................. 62 CHAPTER 3: CASE DESCRIPTION AND NARRATIVE ......................................................................... 66 CASE PREHISTORY ...................................................................................................................... 68 Case Players ............................................................................................................................... 77 Case History ............................................................................................................................... 88 Aftermath ................................................................................................................................. 127 CHAPTER 4: ANALYSIS .................................................................................................................. 130 Event-Level Analysis ................................................................................................................. 131 Transition-Level Analysis .......................................................................................................... 165 CHAPTER 5: CONCLUSION ............................................................................................................ 187 Summary of Research .............................................................................................................. 187 Conclusions .............................................................................................................................. 190 Lessons for Practice and Theory .............................................................................................. 197 Limitations and Future Study ................................................................................................... 202 APPENDIX A: SURVEY ................................................................................................................... 206 iv PREFACE -- September 6, 2015 – Running along the Anacostia River in the Navy Yard thinking about what government can and cannot do. I spent the first 18 years of my life a mile from this place but I never could have imagined that I would be here on a Sunday morning, spotting kayakers and great blue herons. It occurred to me, that despite its detractors on the right and the left, that government still has the power to make a huge bet on a place. Studies can assess the eventual return that public sector investment has brought to a specific location, but it is hard to quantify a cue, the overwhelming signal that is emitted when government pushes all of its chips to the center of the table and goes all in --The Author-- v 1 INTRODUCTION Views on the state vary from Plato’s focus on justice and reason (1955) to Hobbes’ (1651) nod to the importance of order, Locke’s (1713) focus on rights, and Rousseau’s (1763) treatise on governing consent. These foundational concepts inspired America to establish a democratic republic in place of monarchy. Later, Marx (1846) viewed the state as a weapon wielded by the bourgeoisie in their struggle against the proletariat and Weber (1919) saw it as an entity who held the sole claim to authority and a monopoly on the use of violence that relied on legitimation. These historical views assumed government wields centralized power. The last century saw both a shift in the nature of the state apparatus and an evolving theoretical focus that began to view the state as decentralized. Democratic reactions to totalitarianism sought to diffuse power into many directions and the bureaucratic revolution created entities with permanent influence not subject to the wishes of the electorate. The downward diffusion of power happened at the same time that globalization and governmental super-structures such as the UN and the EU dispersed the authority and influence of the state upward. Thus, in this era of post-legitimacy and increasingly complex organizations, the state is better conceptualized as a loose network of formal and informal political, economic, and social links rooted in the social structure (Jessop, 2002). However, the question remains: can government, defined here as simply the loci 2 where formal institutional power resides, still wield influence? Can it matter in a meaningful sense? Understanding that “the state” involves non-governmental actors, this dissertation seeks to explore the role that formal “government” played in the development of the Navy Yard neighborhood in Washington, D.C. and examine how governmental forces interacted with the private sector and other entities during the case period (1995-2008) to alter the city form. The investigation of how these agents and entities interacted is this study’s center. On its face, the case of the Navy Yard would appear to be one of Regime Theory, where government had a goal and assembled private-sector partners to achieve it. The truth, however, turns out to be more complex and elusive. Recent decades saw transformative shifts in both Washington D.C.’s built environment and population. Perhaps no neighborhood demonstrates this more than the Navy Yard, which consisted of vacant lots, light industrial sites, nightclubs, and housing projects, but now features mixed use buildings, upscale residences, a riverside park, and a stadium. The change has been dramatic, but this dissertation does not praise the Navy Yard’s “arc of progress” nor does it lament an “eden of equality lost.”