Between Citizen and City

Abstract

During the 1960s and early 1970s, in city after city, the quiet, civic-betterment variety of neighborhood associations were joined, and in many cases were replaced, by new neighborhood action groups. The roots of the new neighborhood participation were the federal government's war on poverty, which stressed the neighborhood organization as a mechanism for overcoming entrenched urban bureaucracies and political structures, and the tide of urban change that swept cities during this era, which as often as not provoked aggressive counteraction by white homeowner associations. Nobody doubts that these groups made life more complex for urban politicians and administrators and provoked a crisis of governance in many cities. At doubt, however, is the staying power of location-based groups in the face of powerful forces, both in the city and beyond its boundaries, pushing for restoration of the status quo ante. In the first book to pose the question of the long-term effects of the neighborhood movement, John Clayton Thomas argues that the neighborhood movement changed, perhaps forever, the structure of the urban political landscape. His evidence comes from a thorough study of the changing roles of citizen organizations in Cincinnati, which included historical analysis, a citizen survey, in-depth interviews with community leaders and public officials, and analysis of grant allocations to neighborhoods. Thomas first reexamines the literature on neighborhood governance, concentrating more on the skeptics (including the author of this review) than on the advocates. This approach is an effective one, because it leaves as the major task for the book the demonstration of the contrary proposition. By refusing to acknowledge the generally exaggerated claims of the earlier neighborhood advocates, Thomas can concentrate on the refutation of those who came to the conclusion that the neighborhood movement could make little difference in community governance. But Thomas goes further. Not only do neighborhood groups continue to affect the political process, at least in Cincinnati, but they have become entrenched at the bureau level. Indeed, they behave much as traditional interest groups at the national and state levels. In Cincinnati the majority of community council members are white homeowners, and their participation increases with their resources (p. 60). Yet the legacy of the war on poverty made the process less unrepresentative than it would have been otherwise. Hence, what is left is a well-entrenched, moderately unrepresentative, neighborhood-based, interest-group system which regularly influences service delivery and budgetary deci-