Real Estate Interests Research Articles

Mega-events and urban regeneration in Rio de Janeiro: planning in a state of emergency

This article examines the role of sporting mega-events in the reconfiguration of the urban landscape, to understand some of their impacts upon social groups directly affected by large projects involved in the construction of the so-called ‘Olympic City’. It studies the case of Rio de Janeiro, which will host the 2014 football World Cup and the 2016 Summer Olympic Games. The article seeks to demonstrate how mega-events are being instrumentalized by local political and economic elites, especially by a coalition of ambitious civic leaders, private entrepreneurs, and local real estate interests, who exploit the event-related sense of urgency, mobilization, and consensus in order to remake the city in their own image. Through the study of a series of projects conceived with the mega-events deadline in mind, and with a special emphasis on Porto Maravilha’s port revitalization project, the article shows how such an event-led planning model fosters an exclusive vision of urban regeneration. It sustains that such vision can open the way for the state-assisted privatization and commodification of the urban realm, and promote the rise of a new, ‘exceptional’ form of neo-liberal urban regeneration in the Latin American landscape, which serves the needs of capital while exacerbating socio-spatial segregation, inequality and social conflicts.

Villain and Visionary

This article is about the legacy of William Mulholland, engineer of the Los Angeles Aqueduct who was instrumental in building public support for funding and building the project. Supporters hail him as a masterful campaigner and visionary without whom Los Angeles could not have developed into a major city; detractors accuse him of swindling farmers in the Owens Valley out of money and water rights and a puppet of powerful real estate interests in Los Angeles who lied to the public to get voters to support the aqueduct.

How Local Politics Shape Federal Policy: Business, Power, and the Environment in Twentieth-Century Los Angeles

Sarah S. Elkind argues that the intense interest-group politics of local, regional, and national environmental policy during the mid-twentieth century demonstrate the disproportionate (though not hegemonic) influence of business organizations along with increasing criticism of federal power—a combination she subsumes under the rubric of localism. Departing from Los Angeles in the 1920s and ending in Washington, D.C., in the 1950s, Elkind analyzes five battles over pollution control and resource use. The composite portrait reveals a pluralism of neither the virtuous Madisonian variety nor the pragmatic census version of the postwar era; instead, Elkind details a cynical scramble for advantage in which attempts to disrupt established “clientelistic” arrangements drew accusations of “special interest” at the local level and “socialism” at the federal level. Conflict among economic groups, rather than simple elitism, lies at the heart of Elkind's stories: a public-beach movement pitted oil producers against real estate interests; household incinerators, automobiles, and heavy industries contributed to smog, prompting efforts by homeowners and manufacturers to impose restrictions on each other rather than themselves; upstream El Monte fought downstream Long Beach over flood control on the San Gabriel River; and Arizona agriculture competed with southern California's Imperial Valley and power-hungry cities over the Hoover Dam. Elkind hints that an insufficiently inclusive political process minimized the influence of less organized interests in these fights, though it is hard to see what the addition of more voices would have achieved, since the system (at all levels) seemed incapable of satisfactorily incorporating the groups that did manage to be heard. That “beleaguered” officials should gravitate toward organizations that provided “political services” such as “information, policy ideas, and allies” is, therefore, neither surprising nor especially sinister: an aggregator of interests such as the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce, though never quite capable of offering a consensus, was a godsend in debates that wore on for decades (pp. 52, 2, 80).

The Roots and Routes of Urban Renewal

This synthetic essay offers a new look at the origins of the ideas that underpinned urban renewal. Recent accounts separate policy history from the cultural influence of modernism in planning and architecture to show how real estate interests and urban planners co-opted the reform energies and social idealism of the modern housing movement and brought private capital downtown. However, understanding the full history of urban renewal requires showing how it was shaped as both policy and idea. This essay traces the intertwined history of campaigns for both slum clearance and modern housing to show how the motives of planning, profit, and reform idealism combined to form both a modernist “ethic of city rebuilding” and an aggressive program for ridding the city of “blight” and restoring property values. Urban renewal was indebted to both, and a full accounting of its history should reveal the tense and productive relations between the two.

On the Continued Cost of Upkeep Related to Groins and Jetties

Abstract Pietrafesa, L.J., 2012. On the continued cost of upkeep related to groins and jetties. So-called terminal groins, which are actually jetties at the terminus of barrier islands where inlets are located, have been the subject of controversy for half a century in North Carolina. Coastal scientists have opposed these hardened structures and point to their destructive effects upon downstream beaches, requiring ever increasing and costly beach renourishment projects. Meanwhile, some coastal engineers have claimed that they can be used to “stabilize” migrating inlets. Local politicians, in response to real estate interests, have argued for the construction of the hardened structures and, in contrast to the claims of the scientists on the ground, have cited examples of success in North Carolina and at other locales on the U.S. eastern seaboard. So what are the facts? This Editorial presents the documented facts for North Carolina and the other U.S. east coast locales.

Wagner-Steagall and the D.C. Alley Dwelling Authority

Problem, research strategy, and findings: How was it that the Housing Act of 1937 (the Wagner-Steagall Act) goal of decent housing for all took a back seat in subsequent legislation to economic development aimed at enhancing cities’ fiscal viability? For insight into this question, this article examines the alternative to Wagner-Steagall offered by the D.C. Alley Dwelling Authority (ADA), the public housing program created by Congress for the nation's capital in 1934. The ADA approach had the potential to keep housing goals the top priority of federal investment in the city, even as policymaking transitioned toward urban redevelopment. I explore the ADA operating rationale and methods; ADA impact in shaping U.S. public housing policy; and the factors that contributed to collapse of the ADA approach. The ADA effort presciently targeted the key challenge facing the U.S. public housing program, that of integrating it into existing land use and planning regimes, by seeking to establish a sustainable division-of-labor among public housers, private real estate interests, and city planners. The ADA fell short of its goal of establishing itself as Washington, DC's citywide redevelopment authority because it was unable to achieve this integration. Takeaway for practice: Practitioners should invest less effort in winning ambitious declarations of substantive policy objectives than in crafting policy processes to quietly interweave new programs with established operations. Research support: This research was supported by the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library.

Sprawl e o modal de transporte motorizado: impactos na cidade de Londrina, PR

Após cerca de 80 anos desde a construção do seu núcleo, representado hoje pela área central da cidade, Londrina, no interior do Estado do Paraná, configura-se como uma cidade nova, porém com características e tendências de políticas de planejamento que reproduzem os maus exemplos das cidades brasileiras. Com uma ocupação urbana em franca expansão, o crescimento de norte a sul do município agrega vazios urbanos e especulação imobiliária nos seus interstícios que delineia uma cidade longe da ideal, conforme pensada nos seus primórdios. Com um ar metropolitano, e ao mesmo tempo com aspectos interioranos, Londrina é marca de uma ocupação orientada por políticas excludentes e interesses imobiliários, fato que tem impactado o modo de vida da população e gerado impactos ambientais para todas as classes sociais. Esta pesquisa discute a forma de ocupação urbana de Londrina, caracterizada pelo fenômeno de sprawl e sua relação com o modo de expansão observado e as implicações do uso intensivo de automóveis. A opção pelo uso do automóvel em Londrina tem sido crescente e gerado congestionamentos no trânsito. Como consequência, tem-se a desapropriação constante de imóveis para alargamento de vias e, ao mesmo tempo, a presença de vazios urbanos e densidades diversas formando um espaço urbano desigual e dificultando um planejamento urbano eficiente.

Trouble in Smogville

By the mid-1950s the rapidly growing Toronto was arguably North America’s third-worst smog-stricken city. Its downtown waterfront area, referred to by the local media as “Smogville,” was home to a range of pollution sources, many of which were exempt from regulation by the city. At issue politically was whether the authority to regulate polluting sources would stay with Metropolitan Toronto or be handed to the Ontario government and whether the former would be able to regulate the exempt sources (in particular, trains, ships, and various types of manufacturers). By the end of the decade, Metropolitan Toronto still governed the pollution sources within its borders, but with substantially expanded authority to do so. This article provides an account of the politics of the city’s early attempt at air pollution governance, focusing on the role played by Toronto’s real estate interests in lobbying for air pollution relief.

Book review: The Making of a Biogeographer: the life of Jack Briggs

ISSN 1948-6596 news and update family. With new sequence data and new tech- nologies becoming available, some parts of the presented phylogenies will certainly change. Some of the open questions will hopefully be solved soon, but I strongly believe that it will take a long time before this book is outdated. The book can be ordered for 110 US$ from http://www.compositae.org/, and by e-mail to compositaebook@gmail.com. All profits go to the International Association for Plant Taxonomy (IAPT) (http://www.botanik.univie.ac.at/iapt/). Kadereit, J.W., & Jeffrey, C. (2007) Asteraceae. In The families and genera of vascular plants, vol. 8 (ed by K. Kubitzki). Springer, Berlin. References Edited by Joaquin Hortal Hanno Schaefer Division of Biology, Imperial College London, UK e-mail: hanno.schaefer@imperial.ac.uk http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/people/ hanno.schaefer Bremer, K. (1994) Asteraceae: Cladistics & Classifica- tion. Timber Press, Portland. book review The Making of a Biogeographer: the life of Jack Briggs A Professorial Life. An Autobiographical Account, by John C. Briggs Xlibris Corporation, 2009, 272 pp. ISBN 13 (TP): 978-1-4415-8881-4 http://academicautobiography.com/ With “A Professorial Life” John (Jack) Briggs, an icon in the field of Biogeography, follows the ad- vice of Renaissance sculptor Benvenuto Cellini, who suggested that every person should write their autobiography. At the outset Briggs defines his autobiography as an interlace between profes- sional and personal life that feed on each other and can’t be separated. Since he is turning 90 this year, Briggs has experienced enough changes both in the discipline and in society to have material for an insightful book. His book broadly covers three main areas: his personal life, a career in academia, and his main scientific contributions. His personal life is entertaining. I found his accounts of early fishing and hunting in wild California to be full of nostalgic charm. His short foray in the Air Force during WWII, followed by some hairy flights and landings in people’s fields in his personal airplane soon after the war, brought back a long lost sense of adventure. Jack Briggs married four times (his first wife married fifteen times!) and has nine chil- dren and many grandchildren. Thus his diatribes denouncing the poor state of education in the US, and his writing of a scientific children’s book (A Mesozoic Adventure, which incidentally my kids thoroughly enjoyed) clearly come from personal experience and frustration. A recurrent theme in the book is his interest in real estate. I quickly lost count of the number of houses that the Briggs household moved in and out of, bought and sold, I am wondering if Jack Briggs knows this number himself. The autobiography then moves into the sci- entific aspect of Briggs’ life. It is very interesting to try to figure out how Briggs’ career choices shaped his biogeographic thinking. As a child and young man, Briggs extensively camped and fished in Yosemite National Park, California, and later worked as a ranger at Crater Lake National Park in Oregon. His personal love of the wild streams of the Western US translated in graduate work on the ecology of trout and salmon rivers. As a graduate student at Stanford, which was then still in the intellectual footsteps of David Starr Jordan, he learned to know fishes in the best possible place to do so. As was common then, while being a broad systematist, he also specialized in a par- ticular group of fishes. He focused his attention on gobiesocids, or clingfishes, a group of unique fishes with a sucking disk on their underside that, frontiers of biogeography 2.1, 2010 — © 2010 the authors; journal compilation © 2010 The International Biogeography Society

La cittŕ come bene comune. Costruire il futuro partendo dalla storia

This article explains how history is the teacher of life, by illustrating the context in which the right to the city emerged in Italy in the late 1960s, declined in the 1980s, when a new vision of society and new values triumphed, and attempts now to rise again through the claims of new urban movements as a mean to criticize, resist and replace the urban imaginary sustained by neoliberalism. It is argued that the myriad incidents that arise from below, expressing individual suffering, the deterioration of the physical environment, the danger to human health, the loss of services and communal spaces and the precarious status of employment can be transformed into a common action and embodied by the imaginary of the "city as a common good". This, in turn requires a planning process that forgoes the objectives and privileges of real estate interests, the growing economic value of indiscriminate urbanised development regardless of any real social priorities. Instead it has to embrace the welfare of present and future populations, in terms of health, access to resources, common goods, both natural and historical, regardless of social, cultural, or economic conditions.

Shopping for Schools

Suburban historians have generally neglected the role of schools as an explanatory factor in the transformation of twentieth-century U.S. metropolitan space, since public education does not fit neatly into their narrative. At the same time, educational historians have focused so intently on the rise and decline of big-city school systems that they have largely failed to account for suburbanization. This article seeks to bridge the gap by examining the rising practice of “shopping for schools,” the buying and selling of private homes to gain access to more desirable public school attendance zones. This case study of three communities near Hartford, Connecticut,traces the convergence of real estate interests, suburban homebuyers, and government officials, particularly as the postwar labor market increasingly rewarded higher levels of educational attainment. Shopping for schools not only brings together educational credentialism and suburban consumerism but also helps to explain increasing stratification among suburbs in recent decades.

The City’s Wealth and the City’s Limits

The history of housing policy in Berkeley over the past thirty-five years provides a case study in the limits that state government can place on local government efforts to increase social equity. In 1976, a group of visionary planners and activists wrote The Cities’ Wealth: Programs for Community Economic Control in Berkeley, California. Berkeley’s progressives won control of the city government and tried to implement the proposed housing policies, which included strong rent controls to shield tenants from rising rents and using taxes and exactions to divert part of the city’s increasing real estate values toward production of nonprofit affordable housing. Conservative antitax activists and real estate interests were able to use appeals to the state courts, lobbying the state legislature and statewide initiatives to weaken or block many of the progressive programs.

Rufus W. Peckham and the Pursuit of Economic Freedom

Rufus W. Peckham and the Pursuit of Economic Freedom JAMES W. ELY, JR.* It is striking that Rufus W. Peckham has received so little scholarly attention and remains without a biography. He was, of course, the author ofLochner v. New York (1905),' one ofthe most famous and contested decisions in the history of the Supreme Court. Moreover, Peckham wrote important opinions dealing with contractual freedom, anti-trust law, eminent domain, dormant commerce power, and the Eleventh Amendment. Indeed, Owen M. Fiss maintains that Peckham and DavidJ. Brewerwere intellectual leaders ofthe FullerCourt, “influential withinthe dominant coalition and the source ofthe ideas that gave the Court its sweep and direction.” Even when they did not prevail, Fiss observed, Peckham and Brewer “set the terms for the debate.”2 Why has such an influential jurist been so conspicuously overlooked in the historical literature? One might be tempted to explain this neglect in terms of the disdain that many scholars feel toward the jurisprudence of the Gilded Age, with its emphasis on economic liberty and limited government. It is an old adage that winners write history. Scholars who view the work of the Supreme Court through the lens of the Progressive and New Deal mind-set would likely have little sympathy for Peckham.3 After all, he was skeptical about much of the legislation associated with the Progressive movement and strenuously rejected the emerging statist liberalism. While, no doubt, this is a partial expla­ nation, it is not ultimately persuasive. Other leadingjurists ofthe late nineteenth century— StephenJ. Field,4 Melville W. Fuller,5 Brewer,6 Thomas M. Cooley7—have received consider­ able scholarly attention. Eventhe controversial Lochner decision has been the subject ofrevi­ sionist and more sympathetic accounts in re­ cent years.8 So we are left with an unresolved question as to why Justice Peckham lingers in relative obscurity. I propose in this article to take a fresh look at Peckham’s career and assess his signature issue, a commitment to liberty of contract. Background Born in 1838 in Albany, New York, Peckham was part of a family ofprominent lawyers and judges. Indeed, in many respects Peckham’s THE PURSUIT OF ECONOMIC FREEDOM 23 early career followed in the footsteps of his father. The elder Peckham was a district attor­ ney, a member ofCongress, and served on both the New York Supreme Court and the Court of Appeals. Rufus Peckham was educated locally and studied law in his father’s office. He was admitted to the New York bar in 1859. Joining the family firm, Peckham built a successful practice representing the Albany and Susque­ hanna Railroad, a local bank, and real estate interests. Peckham was very active in Democratic party affairs and in 1868 he was elected district attorney forAlbany County, a post that he held for three years. From 1881 to 1883 he was cor­ poration counsel for the City of Albany. Par­ ticipating regularly in Democratic party con­ ventions at both the national and state level, Peckham emerged as a leading spokesman for upstate Democrats in their struggle to prevent domination of the party by Tammany Hall, a New York City-based political group. He formed a close friendship with Grover Cleve­ land, and actively supported Cleveland’s rise in New York political life. In 1883 Peckham was elected to the New York Supreme Court. Three years later, then-President Cleveland helped to engineer Peckham’s election to the New York Court of Appeals. Court of Appeals During his nearly ten years on the appellate bench, Peckham proved to be an able judge who avoided partisanship. He authored more than 300 opinions for the Court on a wide va­ riety of private law topics, including property, torts, contracts, and wills. Peckham wrote only eight dissenting opinions, but dissented more than 80 times without opinion. For our pur­ poses, however, Peckham’s opinions raising constitutional issues are of special interest. He demonstrated skepticism about governmental regulation ofthe economy, an aversion to class legislation, and a disposition to define liberty as encompassing economic freedom. Since Peckham carried these views with him to the Born in Albany in 1838, Rufus Peckham studied law at his father’s firm for two years before passing...

The research–policy dialectic

Since the 1980s, research has significantly improved understanding of rental housing in the Global South. This has informed, albeit sporadically, policy reports emanating from the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat) that are yet to be translated into policy. Policymakers continue to doggedly pursue ‘ownership’ as the preferred housing tenure; renting is viewed as exploitative—tenants are seen to be the victims of unscrupulous landlords. Of course, there are exploitative landlords but research in urban Africa, Asia, and Latin America and the Caribbean finds such landlordism to be exceptional. To the contrary, there is overwhelming evidence of the contribution that rental housing makes: to enhance residential mobility, improve labour market and livelihood opportunities, accommodate gender and cultural concerns, and strengthen social and economic networks. Despite the ‘virility of research’ findings, the key question is: why are policymakers reluctant to explore the rental housing option? Is it simply because their views are based on the ‘exploitation’ myth? Is it that the perceived short-term political advantage present in the mantra of ‘ownership’ accounts for the ‘impotence of action’ in formulating a rental housing policy? Alternatively, could it be that real estate interests are so powerful that governments have lost the room for manoeuvre?

The real estate investment of insurance companies in Poland

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to identify possible reasons for insurance companies' scant interest in real estate as investment asset in Poland. The authors attempt to determine the impact of real estate investment on insurance companies' profitability.Design/methodology/approachAfter collecting the aggregated data about insurance companies' financial results for the period 2000‐2008 the authors analyzed the relationship between real estate investment and profitability indicators such as return on assets (ROA), return on equity (ROE) and return on sales (ROS). This approach reflected the shareholders' point‐of‐view. Subsequently, the same kind of analysis was carried out to investigate the impact of real estate investments on the insurance companies' return on technical activity (RTA) and return on investment activity (RIA). These indicators are meant to assess business performance from the point‐of‐view of insured persons.FindingsThe analysis revealed some negative correlations: real estate investments may reduce the profitability of insurance companies. If this is true, the unwillingness of insurance companies to purchase property would not be surprising. Yet, this conclusion should be accepted with caution.Research limitations/implicationsDue to the short study period and changes in legal classification of investment categories, the available data were very imperfect and the study results may not be perceived as undisputable, hence, it is felt that further research is needed.Originality/valueThe paper is original, as previously no such research has been conducted in Poland.

The Adoption of State Growth Management Regulation (SGMR): Regarding Institutional Analysis And Development (IAD) Framework and Event History Analysis

Growth management means specific regulatory policies aimed at influencing future growth so that it occurs in a more rational manner than would occur without any overall planning. Currently, thirteen U.S. states have adopted state growth management regulation (SGMR). The contemporary SGMR provides the statewide planning programs and goals that reduce negative externality and spillover effects and emphasize balanced sustainable development. The mediating role of SGMR is well matched with the explanatory framework of institutional analysis and development (IAD) in terms of solving social dilemmas in social contextual circumstances. This paper seeks to explain what factors account for the adoption of SGMR. By applying the IAD framework, the authors analyze the impact of political party ideology, community characteristics, and physical conditions. Through event history analysis, the authors found influencing important factors: political party ideology and citizen liberalism, real estate interest, and growth pressure.

HOMEless: a case study of private/public inversion and the temporal–spatial exclusion faced by migrant domestic workers

This paper is a case study of the shutdown of HOME (the House for Migrant Workers' Empowerment), a cultural and service center for migrant workers. HOME was founded by the Taipei City Labor Bureau (TCLB) and subcontracted to TIWA (the Taiwan International Workers' Association) in 2002, when the Director of the TCLB was the former labor activist Zheng Cun‐qi. For migrant domestic workers, the distinction between sold‐time and free‐time (i.e. the work–rest distinction) is blurred. Most of their supposedly private reproductive activities are temporally squeezed into holidays and spatially forced into public places where they are exposed to the scrutiny of the Taiwanese. This peculiar situation of private/public inversion not only results from, but also serves to reinforce, racial discrimination and class inferiority in their workplace (i.e. the homes of their employers). I use the concept of ‘bracketing’ to describe the spatial‐temporal strategies used by migrant domestic workers against this distorted inversion. I also analyze how employers ‘counter‐bracket’ migrant worker subjects as a counter strategy. HOME once existed as a ‘surrogate home’, providing shelter for migrant workers and allowing them to retain privacy during their days off. TIWA conducted organizing‐oriented cultural and political activities to assist the migrants in forming their own community, and challenged the spatial hegemony of real estate owners in the ChungShan District. However, when Yan Shang‐luan, a well‐known feminist labor research professor, took over the directorship of the TCLB in 2004, she did not appreciate the function of HOME, and decided to close its doors. In analyzing the official rhetoric in the documents of the TCLB, I find that their decision to shut down HOME was a result of their middle‐class temporal‐spatial ‘habitus’. The shutdown became a counter‐bracket measure, which coincided with the real estate interests of the ChungShan local elites.

Blueprint for disaster: the unraveling of Chicago public housing

Blueprint for Disaster traces public housing's history in Chicago from its New Deal roots through current mayor Richard M. Daley's Plan for Transformation. In the process, D. Bradford Hunt chronicles the Chicago Housing Authority's own transformation from the city's most progressive government agency to its largest slumlord. Challenging explanations that attribute the projects' decline primarily to racial discrimination and real estate interests, Hunt argues that well-intentioned but misguided policy decisions - ranging from design choices to maintenance contracts - also paved the road to failure. Moreover, administrators who fully understood the potential drawbacks did not try to halt such deeply flawed projects as Cabrini-Green and the Robert Taylor Homes. The resulting combination of fiscal crisis, managerial incompetence, and social unrest plunged the CHA into a quagmire from which it is still struggling to emerge. Blueprint for Disaster, then, is an urgent reminder of the havoc poorly conceived policy can wreak on our most vulnerable citizens.

Farm credit member‐borrowers' preferences for patronage payments

PurposeMany associations in the Farm Credit System, which are financial cooperatives, pay their member‐borrowers a cash patronage payment based on the amount of loan volume with the association. In today's competitive lending environment, some Farm Credit associations have offered lower interest rates on new loans but these new member‐borrowers have to forgo their cash patronage payment to receive this new, lower‐interest rate loan. The purpose of this paper is to identify Farm Credit member‐borrowers' preferences for patronage refunds received as a cash payment versus lower fixed real estate interest rates.Design/methodology/approachPreferences for patronage refunds or lower fixed interest rates are elicited from Farm Credit Services of East Central Oklahoma member‐borrowers via conjoint analysis.FindingsResults show that member‐borrowers strongly prefer patronage refunds compared to lower fixed interest rates.Originality/valueThis paper fulfills a need to better understand patronage refund programs within the Farm Credit System.

Paving the way: New York road building and the American state, 1880-1956

Most historians have credited New Deal initiatives in economic regulation and social welfare policy with bringing about the modern American state. Michael Fein now reveals the surprising story of how road building paved the way to the modern state during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and how public works policy emerged as a third critical pillar in support of state building.Paving the Way shows that the growing transportation needs of a steadily industrializing nation reconfigured state politics, bringing about a revolution in governance as it reshaped the landscape. Examining state and local policy developments from half a century before the New Deal, Fein describes how the transition from rutted wagon trails to smooth highways shifted road-maintenance responsibility from local residents to state engineers. Focusing on New York State, a national leader in infrastructure development, Fein demonstrates that its citizens gradually became more comfortable with state bureaucracy because it resulted in better roads.This conferral of political legitimacy on state engineers by the general populace proved instrumental in the consolidation of engineers' power, translating their professional expertise into a new kind of politics. Fein charts five distinct road-building policy regimes to explain how a basic function of governance - providing public ways - evolved from 1880 to 1956. He also explores the contested nature of these regime changes, as cycling and automobile clubs, construction and real estate interests, hard-nosed agrarians, urban bosses, and professional engineers sought to shape highway policy to their advantage.Fein argues that these state-local power negotiations were important rehearsals for the overall centralization of bureaucratic authority in the mid-twentieth century. Although other traditionally local policy concerns such as education and social welfare would undergo similar transformations, road building was the first major policy area in which older relations between citizens and governing institutions were replaced by modern intergovernmental arrangements.Paving the Way reminds us that what we take for granted today as a basic function of government bureaucracy was once an open and even controversial question. It offers a new perspective on federal power, arguing that the modern American state rested on the rise of a more complex federalism than has been supposed.