Chapter 11: The End of Urbanism - Summary Comments

Below are my summary comments on Chapter 11. The previous blog post contains a description of what I want you to do for extra credit, if you attend the talk by former Austin,TX mayor Will Wynn tomorrow (Thurs. 10/28) at 11AM in Leonard Aud.

CHAPTER 11: THE END OF URBANISM

Rae opens by describing the precipitous drop in manufacturing in New Haven -- the closing of factories and even more rapid decline in factory employment.

1. The Lee administration thought the new Interstate highways (I-95 & I-91) intersecting in the center of New Haven would encourage manufacturers to locate there. Instead, "...the highways decentralized everything they touched."

2. There was a 60% decline in factory jobs during the Lee redevelopment era.

3. Two larger historical trends contributed to this as well: (a) competition from the Sunbelt. Sunbelt cities having the advantages of lower taxes, lower energy costs, lower labor costs, etc. Not to mention global competition. (b) regional competition opened up by interstate highways: more land to build on, lower taxes, fewer security concerns (crime), etc.

All told: "The impact was immense -- fewer good jobs, especially fewer good working class jobs, fewer opportunities for high school graduates without academic pretentions, fewer households in the city, fewer taxable properties, fewer dollars flowing from wage earners to neighborhood merchants, decreasing leverage for city government in regulating central-place land use." (p. 363)

Then, the strike at the Winchester plant added insult to injury. See top, p. 367. Cites catastrophic job loss over 40+ years (1954-1997) - 90%!

The "fabric of enterprise" was torn to pieces. Neighborhood grocery store decline (although Rae also notes that larger stores were more efficient, cheaper).

Notes that Lee's redevelopment policies did contribute to this decline -- many stores closed due to urban renewal. But, again, larger forces at play contributed more to this. Seems like a long, irresistible trend, helped along by zoning regulations which separated commercial and residential space.

"What eventually emerged, and prevails today, was utterly different from the fabric of enterprise described in Chapter 3."

Rae observes the "dispersion of the grand list," p. 373f -- that is, the grand list of taxable property which gets dispersed to suburban areas. Table 11.3, p. 374, tells this dramatic story in dollars.

Another aspect of the end of urbanism is the decline of voluntary organizations. And here again we clearly see larger forces at work such as the rise of television and the growth of technology which catered to individuals more than the general public, as that long passage from Robert Putnam ("Bowling Alone") brings out. pp. 377-8.

You have the "professionalization of civic fauna" -- that is organizations that used to involve city residents, now being managed by professional staff. And those professionals had less connection with the communities they served.

Mainstream, institutionalized religions decline, such as the Catholics, and are replaced by smaller, storefront churches. They become dominant influences in many working-class, ghetto neighborhoods.

Public housing declines as these areas become areas of concentrated poverty and crime. They tie poor people to an inner city that offers few amenities and opportunities. New Haven makes the top ten list in pecentage of city residents living below the poverty line. (see p. 385)

Perhaps most telling of the end of urbanism is the tremendous increase in crime, especially violent crime -- see graph p. 387 and Table 11-4 at bottom. In this context, Rae reminds us of one of the benefits of a vibrant urbanism -- effectiveness at controlling crime which no police department can accomplish on its own. "A major part of what I mean by urbanism is the effectiveness of these extragovernmental mechanisms for the most fundamental task of governance -- preventing criminal aggression in the city's streets and homes. These informal mechanisms had become ineffective, at great cost to the livability of the city." (p. 389)

Rae introduces an interesting term in the last section, "useful ineffciency" -- that urbanism had a massive collection of useful inefficiencies, from mom-and-pop grocery stores to smaller streets, etc. which served important purposes even if they were inefficient from the point of view of the market. He also stresses that those pushing technological change, market efficiency are not villains.

But this raises a big question in my mind: SHOULD WE NECESSARILY ASPIRE TO MARKET EFFICIENCY AT THE EXPENSE OF URBANISM?
__________________________

That's all for now. I'll post summary comments for Chapter 12 by the end of the week. And remember, we are going to get into "Heat Wave" on Thursday (11/28) and be meeting in our old place, Main 122.