Model Cities Program Research Articles

Broker power: real estate brokers in the St. Louis Model Cities program, 1966–1975

ABSTRACT Evaluations of Model Cities have focused on whether federal officials and local planners lived up to the programme’s rhetoric of citizen empowerment. However, as this case study of St. Louis will demonstrate, more attention is needed to the ways that the local real estate sector influenced and frustrated government officials and community activists alike. Policies of disinvestment in mid-twentieth century cities produced a small but powerful group of landlords and real estate brokers in St. Louis, whose near-monopoly control of the housing market hindered grassroots rehabilitation efforts. In 1967, a Black-led community group known as Jeff-Vander-Lou, Inc. (JVL), found that the ‘slumlords’ who dominated their neighbourhood were too powerful to be compelled by municipal tools such as code enforcement. Realizing they could not defeat the landlords, they reluctantly joined them, and crafted a Model Cities demonstration programme that they hoped could improve housing conditions and attenuate the strangle-hold of landlords on their neighbourhood. As this article will detail, this momentary alliance allowed landlords to influence the St. Louis housing policy for Model Cities and beyond.

Marshall Plan or neocolonization? The Model Cities Program and Black planning criticism

ABSTRACT This paper analyses the writing of Black activists, planners, and critics to reconcile two opposing perceptions of the Model Cities Program: an initiative known for its elevation of Black elected officials and a program that used the guise of citizen participation to stifle more radical forms of dissent. In 1966, Model Cities emerged in part from the call for a domestic Marshall Plan for Black Americans. Yet as the program began making incremental changes to the country’s neighbourhoods from 1967 to the early 1970s, participants and critics instead began to see Model Cities’ relationship to Black Americans as a new form of colonialism. To determine how this shift occurred, this paper analyses this critical commentary against the archival evidence of Model Cities implementation in the cities in which it appeared. Situating these authors’ arguments within the parallel emergence of Black studies and participatory planning as well as within larger Cold War diplomatic history, planning history, and African American intellectual history reveals how visions of revolution turned into a program of representation. Meanwhile, the plans these figures produced as part of Model Cities point to what a revolutionary program might yet be.

“The Magna Carta to Liberate Our Cities”

Starting in 1964, the U.S. federal government under President Lyndon Johnson passed an ambitious reform program that included social security, urban renewal, anti-poverty initiatives, and civil rights legislation. In cities like Los Angeles, these reforms fueled urban revitalization efforts in communities affected by economic decline. These reforms closed the gap between local residents and government officials in California and even subsequently brought the city’s African American and Mexican American population into greater political proximity. Looking closely at the impact of the Chicano Movement on the Model Cities Program, a federal initiative designed specifically for urban development and renewal, this article brings the role of U.S. government policy in shaping social justice priorities in Los Angeles, and the U.S. Southwest more broadly, into sharper view.

“Progress and Perfectability”: Urban Policy, Model Cities, and Community Control in the Shadow of Newark

Positioning itself against arguments that claim that the Model Cities program (initially known as the 1966 Demonstration Cities and Metropolitan Development Act) was either an unmitigated failure, an attempt to co–opt activists, or an effort to introduce the “carceral state” nationwide, this paper examines the implementation of Model Cities in a historically integrated suburb and argues that while the program was assuredly only a “limited success,” it did provide both funding and social space in which residents could forge intergenerational and cross–racial alliances, as well as launch challenges to federal urban renewal policy and notions of community control. As such, this case is illustrative of the role of federal monies in responding to urban dislocation and unrest, and exemplifies the ways in which urban residents can forge bonds of solidarity even in the face of bureaucratic regulations and political obstructions meant to discourage citizen participation.

Building “A Ladder of Citizen Participation”

Problem, research strategy, and findings: Sherry Arnstein’s “A Ladder of Citizen Participation” is the cornerstone for planners thinking about citizen participation. Arnstein wrote the article based on her experiences working at the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) from 1967 to 1968 as the chief advisor on citizen participation in the Model Cities Program. Despite the article’s substantial influence on the planning field, very little has been published about Arnstein herself and the contributing factors that influenced her writing. In this article, I draw on life history and archival research to place “A Ladder of Citizen Participation” and its author in their historical context, offering new insights into the politics behind the emphasis on citizen involvement in the Model Cities Program and Arnstein’s call to action for a new “partnership” interpretation of citizen participation. I conclude with Arnstein’s broader partnership model as a new point of departure for the emerging dialogue about the equalizing relationship between local government and community groups among the next generation of planners and scholars.Takeaway for practice: There are two takeaways that practicing planners can learn from following Arnstein’s journey in building “A Ladder of Citizen Participation.” First, Arnstein’s career is a blueprint that shows how community advocacy planners can be pragmatic instigators for change. Her professional working model in establishing shared understandings while working within institutional constraints is an important strategy Arnstein used to tackle nationwide injustices ranging from juvenile delinquency, to segregation of hospitals, to inequitable citizen participation practices. Second, Arstein only discusses half of her HUD citizen participation work in “A Ladder.” The other half of her citizen participation work looked at local governments taking the lead for creating equitable citizen participation processes through the building of long-term “partnerships” with local community groups.

Making the Mission: Planning and Ethnicity in San Francisco

Ocean Howell's Making the Mission explores the durability of local, neighborhood-based planning, coalition building, spatial practices, and ethnic formation in San Francisco's famed Mission District. Howell compellingly argues that these nodes of collective action forged and sustained the Mission's enduringly distinct entity—a city within a city—throughout the twentieth century. Howell also connects urban and ethnic histories, arguing persuasively that “broader shifts in the very boundaries of ethnicity,” especially regarding Latinas/os, “were accomplished in no small part through debates over urban planning power” (p. 21, emphasis in original). In fact, he argues that “neighborhood identity was largely ethnic identity,” even as the Mission's cultural politics shifted from defending whiteness to celebrating diversity (p. 121). Making the Mission also triangulates San Francisco, Chicago, and Los Angeles, in part to demonstrate profound differences between San Francisco and the most studied cities of the “great West.” Howell divides the narrative into four periods defined by the availability of institutional space at the municipal, state, and federal levels to allow Mission-based planners political and spatial efficacy. From the 1906 earthquake through the 1920s, “citizens of the Mission” took leading roles in determining the district's economic, social, and spatial development by acting collectively through unions, social groups, and the powerful Mission Promotion Association. During the 1930s, New Deal agencies favored sanctioned municipal authorities, limiting the Mission's neighborhood power. From 1945 through the 1950s, the dominance of centralized planning and urban renewal effectively precluded neighborhood planning. Mission organizations endured, however, building stable interethnic coalitions and capacity to work with city government. When the central-planning stranglehold broke, the Mission Coalition Organization partnered with city government and the federal Model Cities program. The new regime of neighborhood planning rose and fell in lockstep with municipal agencies and the Great Society more generally.

Revealing the Empowerment Revolution: A Literature Review of the Model Cities Program

Lauded in its time, Model Cities dominated the final years of the War on Poverty only to be largely forgotten for nearly two decades. In 1966, new legislation led to the implementation of more than 150, five-year long, Model Cities experiments to develop new antipoverty programs and alternative forms of municipal government. Results included a renaissance of minority political leadership. Federal funds supported representatives of economically disadvantaged communities to become more involved in municipal politics; however, a change in the political climate just as these programs were beginning shifted the purpose of Model Cities to bricks and mortar housing and building projects, clouding subsequent analyses of the program. This article reviews related literature from early pieces on planning and implementation in the late 1960s, through a phase of misinterpretation and neglect in the 1980s and 1990s, to a re-emergent interest in Model Cities’ legacy and the phenomenon of citizen participation.

Revealing the Empowerment Revolution: A Literature Review of the Model Cities Program

Revealing the Empowerment Revolution: A Literature Review of the Model Cities Program

Taking Games Seriously

Taking Games Seriously Jennifer Light (bio) Historians have expressed growing interest in the intellectual influences of systems thinking during the early decades of the cold war. Taken together, studies of the military, business, government, and academia between the late 1950s and the late 1970s portray the period as one when systems analysis, operations research, cybernetics, information theory, and related fields came to shape—and in many cases to dominate—myriad professional pursuits. 1 In these accounts of the development and diffusion of systems thinking, [End Page 347] computer technologies have been central, especially in their roles as simulation tools. First developed as calculating machines and quickly applied to forecasting an atomic blast, computers soon took on a new identity as modeling machines, helping communities of professionals to analyze complex structures and scenarios and to anticipate future events. Yet at the same time that these professions worked to advance the cutting edge of systems thinking and computer technology, many of them set out to bring systems theories to lay audiences using another simulation tool. Operational games—games played for purposes of teaching and research—played a pivotal role in spreading the gospel of systems to diverse populations. Focusing on one effort to teach systems analysis to an apparently unlikely audience—the communities served by the Model Cities program—this article argues that to understand the full extent of the dominance of systems thinking during the cold war era, scholars must attend to the history of games. Returning these artifacts to a more prominent place in accounts of the period offers insight into the ways that individuals and institutions in the fields that made systems thinking central to their technical work simultaneously conceptualized lay knowledge about systems as fundamental to citizenship in a democracy. The story of the Model Cities games suggests new directions for the history and historiography of systems analysis and simulation. The Model Cities Program: A "Systems Approach" to Urban Improvement Scholars have devoted some attention already to describing the "systems" orientation of participants in the design and execution of U.S. social policies and programs during the 1960s and 1970s. From the Peace Corps to the Community Action Program to Model Cities, federally sponsored initiatives implemented overseas and at home provide evidence of the currency that systems analysis acquired for planning and management beyond its origins in military and space programs, and in turn the social status that this technique's practitioners gained.2 These accounts offer compelling evidence [End Page 348] of how the scientific and technical achievements of the military-industrial complex spawned traffic in systems thinking across a range of fields—and both political parties—and the circulation of expert practitioners from think tanks and universities to Washington, D.C., and back. Yet they have said little about these experts' hopes for exposing nonexpert populations to systems ideas. Model Cities, as an effort to build consensus about plans for city improvement among federal and local planners and city residents by bringing "the unique analytical capability of the cybernetics fraternity, the knowledge of control and communications and information systems to restore the options and the beauty to urban life," put these hopes on display.3 In its initial conceptualization, Model Cities, which ran from the mid 1960s to the late 1970s in about 150 cities, was envisioned as a "marriage between science and urban affairs."4 The program offered local governments federal funding to organize five years of intensive physical, economic, and social planning focused on a single neighborhood in need.5 Designed by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) during the Lyndon Johnson administration, when excitement about systems science and engineering reached its peak, Model Cities exemplified the confidence academics and public officials shared in the ability of a "systems approach" to remedy the complex problems in the nation's cities.6 The cold war context of the 1950s and 1960s, in particular the U.S. government's desire to win hearts and minds on the international stage, provided federal officials with strong incentives to pursue domestic reforms to improve the lives of racial minorities.7 Some of these early efforts faltered, however, and Model Cities explicitly sought to address the...

Steven S. Sharfstein, M.D., M.P.A., 132nd President, 2005–2006

Steven S. Sharfstein, M.D., M.P.A., 132nd President, 2005–2006

An asset-based approach to policymaking: revisiting the history of urban planning and neighborhood change in Cincinnati’s West End

While planners and policymakers have recognized the role of the local assets, including physical capital (housing stock, roads, and the public space) and social capital (the informal networks of trust and reciprocity) in creating healthy communities, the nexus between such assets and policymaking remains vague. This article explores this linkage by chronicling the implementation of various urban policies, including triage, urban renewal, the Model Cities Program, and the Housing Opportunities for People Everywhere (HOPE VI Program) in the West End of Cincinnati. The critical examination of such programs helps us to differentiate between an asset-based as opposed to the conventional need-based approach to policymaking, and to explore the mutual impacts of government policies and the target groups that are affected by them; policies could result in the formation or destruction of the local assets (social capital). The study offers a conceptual framework consisting of policy networks defined in terms of policy type and target groups. Two additional concepts used to evaluate the mutual impacts of policies and target groups include interconnectedness (the strength of relationship between government and the target group) and cohesion (the distribution of objectives among the actors).

THE GEORGIA BLUEBERRY INDUSTRY: ITS HISTORY, PRESENT STATE, AND POTENTIAL FOR DEVELOPMENT IN THE NEXT DECADE

Beginning in 1925 the best selections of rabbiteye blueberries were assembled from private collections of wild seedlings and planted at University of Georgia Tifton Campus. In the mid-1940's due in large part to the foresight of Mr. Cason J. Callaway , Georgia Legislator , funding was secured to establish a blueberry breeding position at Tifton, Ga. In 1944, Dr. Tom Brightwell, was hired and a research site established in the flatwoods district at UGA Alapaha Research Station. Dr. Brightwell and Drs. Darrow, Scott, Galletta, Moore, and Draper from the USDA worked cooperatively on the breeding project. Cultivar releases began in 1950 with 'Callaway' and 'Coastal'. In 1955 the first cultivar with good commercial quality, ‘Tifblue’, was released. The industry developed slowly in the 1950'S and 60's with 40 ha set in scattered locations across Georgia. In the early 1970's, federal grant money via the Model Cities Program in Alma allowed for the purchase of mechanical harvesters and the establishment of a cooperative packing facility named the Georgia Blueberry Association. About 600 hectares were planted in south Georgia during this phase. In the early 1980's, many Georgia growers joined the Michigan Blueberry Growers Association to enhance marketing opportunities. Hectarage increased at a steady pace in the 1980's and 1990's, and currently it is estimated that about 1900 ha have been planted, with ca.85% of production in southeast Georgia. About 15 packing facilities are currently in operation. The Georgia blueberry harvest season begins with southern highbush about April 15th, and continues with rabbiteye season starting about May 25th in the southern most part of Georgia. Harvest continues through July in south Georgia. The harvest season in north Georgia is about one month later. A significant expansion is underway, and Georgia is projected to become the third largest producer of cultivated blueberries in the next decade.

New Jersey Medical School's unique relationship to its community.

The Newark, New Jersey, riot of 1967, sparked in part by tensions created by the conflicting emphasis of President Lyndon Johnson's Model Cities Program, community action programs, and the New Jersey state medical school's move to Newark's Central Ward, has profoundly affected the medical school and its delivery of medical care in Newark. This paper delineates how these Johnson-era programs contributed to the riot and details the continuing legacy of these events on the medical school and the delivery of health care in Newark. The paper concludes that New Jersey Medical School is expected by its community to have a higher standard of local involvement than comparable institutions. Furthermore, it suggests that New Jersey Medical School's relationship and commitment to its community serve as a model for community interactions for medical schools throughout the United States.

Countering Urban Disinvestment through Community-Building Initiatives

Since 1933 housing and community development legislation has been directed at halting the physical deterioration of U.S. cities. Help has come from federally subsidized public housing, the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), urban renewal grants, Model Cities programs, revenue sharing, community development revenue sharing, and housing allowances. More recently, cities have received federal money through tax breaks and direct grants: Urban Development Action Grants of the 1970s, the enterprise zones of the 1980s, the empowerment zones of the 1990s, and the urban revitalization demonstration public housing grants of the 1990s. This article reviews policy approaches to and legislation for community revitalization and discusses how early federal policies contributed to the segregation and isolation of poor neighborhoods. The article describes how new community-based programs and proposed federal initiatives are building on the accumulated expertise of the past 25 years. These initiatives pose challenges for research, policy, and community-level programs by creating policies and programs that transcend people-place dichotomies and recognizing the need for comprehensive community-building strategies. Urban Disinvestment Disinvestment is a series of progressive steps by which area lending institutions extricate themselves from neighborhoods they expect to deteriorate. Among the principal tactics is redlining, thus termed because more blatant disinvestment practice involves drawing red lines around target neighborhoods on area maps. Redlining may consist of outright refusal to accept mortgage or home-improvement loan applications, or it may involve a number of more subtle actions: awarding mortgage loans on inordinately short terms with high down payment requirements, refusing to lend on properties older than a prescribed number of years, stalling on appraisals to discourage potential borrowers, underappraising, refusing to lend in amounts below a fixed minimum figure, and charging inordinately high closing costs. As a policy, disinvestment is defended on the grounds that investment in high-risk areas is equivalent to mismanagement of depositors' funds and is ultimately counterproductive, both for the depositor and for the lending institution. In practice, however, redlining is less a protective action against unnecessary financial risk than a self-fulfilling prophecy of decline for specific neighborhoods. First, the decision to redline is based on a subjective assessment of the likely effects of the race or ethnicity of potential buyers, the age of the housing stock, and the potential for financial loss in a given community. Second, the assessment of decline is often made before evidence of actual decline and without reference to such factors as residents' credit ratings, the current condition of the housing stock regardless of age, and the viability of the community as a whole (including the ability to attract new buyers and the solvency of its businesses) (Naparstek & Cincotta, 1976). Consequently, redlining can undermine healthy communities. And because the immediate result of the decision to redline is the withdrawal of monies required to maintain that community's health, disinvestment ensures that decline will, in fact, occur. Local depositors living in a redlined area find that their savings, instead of being converted to mortgage and home improvement loans for local use, are directed to other, less risky areas, usually new suburban developments. Thus, the residents of redlined neighborhoods are doubly victimized, by the banks' ensuring their neighborhoods' gradual decline and by being deprived of the rightful use of their own savings. Bound inextricably to governing credit policies and to the fiscal well-being of urban centers, redlining has destructive long- and short-term consequences, both for inner-city residents and their communities (Galster, 1996; LaCouer-Little, 1996). …

Understanding Urban Unrest: From Reverend King to Rodney King

Introduction Los Angeles '92 Was Nothing New Civil Rights and Uncivil Riots, 1964 through 1966 Reverend King, The Urban Poor and an Epidemic of Rioting, 1966 Riot-Driven Public Policy, 1966 through 1968 Model Cities Program Plays Out, 1969 through 1975 From Reverend King to Rodney King Responding to Urban Interracial Mob Violence in the 1990s Urban Poverty, Interracial Mob Violence and Federal Reaction The Problem and Political Contexts Urban Poverty, Interracial Mob Violence and Federal Reaction The Policy Context

Can Reorchestration of Historical Themes Reinvent Government? A Case Study of the Empowerment Zones and Enterprise Communities Act of 1993

Reinventing government is rapidly becoming the orchestral theme for public sector officials who must face the music of increasing demands on, and a decline in, available resources. Generally associated with issues of productivity and efficiency, the theme of reinventing government has been extended by the Clinton administration to redefine the relationship between the federal government and local communities. Illustrative of this extension is the administration's Empowerment Zones and Enterprise Communities Program enacted by Congress as part of the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1993. President Clinton has orchestrated the Empowerment Zones and Enterprise Communities Act (EZEC) as dominant themes in his administrations reinventing government symphony. This dominance is clearly enunciated in his memorandum to the President's Community Enterprise Board, which is chaired by Vice President Gore and includes the secretaries of all major departments and councils in the administration. In his memorandum, the President directs the board to implement the EZEC program so that it reflects the principles of the National Performance Review, the vice president's blueprint for streamlining and reinventing government (Clinton, 1993). The primary tones of the EZEC--enterprise zones and local community planning and empowerment--are not new melodies. The enterprise zone, with its geographically targeted tax reductions and regulatory relief, has been a federal and state refrain for almost 15 years. Community planning and empowerment are dearly repetitions of motifs that linger from the 1960's Model Cities program. Is, then, the EZEC program merely a reorchestration of earlier enterprise zone pieces composed during the Reagan-Bush years, with a Clinton spin from Lyndon Johnson's Great Society? If so, does the EZEC reinvent government? To answer these questions, the concepts of enterprise zones and of the Model Cities program, as well as the lessons learned from them, must be clearly understood. This article begins with the origins of enterprise zones in England and traces their historical development in the United States, on both federal and state levels. After presenting the history of enterprise zones, and the lessons to be learned from them, I proceed to review the lessons to be gleaned from the Model Cities program and close by addressing the question, can reorchestration of historical themes be reinventing government? The Origins of Enterprise Zones: The British ]Experiment The concept of using enterprise zones to encourage economic development did not begin in the United States, but is based on a British experiment in urban revitalization of the late 1970s. Coined as a phrase by geographer Peter Hall, and derived from the apparent economic success of enterprise-zone-type policy precedents established in Hong Kong and in Taiwan, the first public pronouncement of the zone concept is generally traced to England's Sir Goeffrey Howe, a Conservative member of Parliament. Howe's 1978 pronouncement was made in London's dockland district, an area then typical of Britain's distressed urban communities. Howe and his supporters saw the implementation of enterprise zones as a way to alleviate urban distress by allowing entrepreneurs to pursue profit with minimum governmental restrictions. This free-market approach, with its emphasis on tax and regulatory relief, stood in stark contrast to Britain's centrally planned economic development programs, which Howe felt were dismal failures. Howe was given the opportunity to implement enterprise zones when he became Chancellor of the Exchequer in Margaret Thatcher's Conservative administration. His 1980 legislation authorized by Parliament provided for geographically targeted tax incentives and regulatory relief It provided for contractual agreements between the central government and local governments that were to establish zone boundaries and the procedures for granting these tax incentives and regulatory relief to local entrepreneurs. …

Neighborhood Rehabilitation Without Relocation or Gentrification

Abstract Project Renewal, Israel's program for social and physical rehabilitation of distressed neighborhoods, is based on lessons from American experience with neighborhood programs in general and with the Model Cities program in particular. A five-year evaluation found that the project has helped to improve living conditions of residents and to prevent deterioration in its target areas, but that those improvements were not enough to overcome the low social and economic status of the neighborhoods and their populations. The major factors that led to the qualified success of Project Renewal were extensive political support, selection of “appropriate” neighborhoods, the opening of some middle class opportunities to lower income populations, and a strategy of public-individual partnership.

CLIC! The Community Library Information Center:

The late '60s saw public libraries moving toward the establishment of information an a referral service through the creation of neighborhood information centers. The Prince George's County Memorial Library System, in Maryland, was one of those systems, establishing CLIC, the Community Library Information Center, in 1971. CLIC was housed in a neighborhood branch library, located within the Model Cities Area. Funded by the federal Model Cities (MNA) program, the service was designed to serve residents and human service providers in the Model Cities Area. Whcn the CLIC proposal was initially conceived, certain basic questions were generated: 1. Can an Information, Referral and Follow-Up (I. R & F.) service be established in a neighborhood branch library, dealing with a limited(geographically) clientele and a limited range of agency services? 2. Can the techniques of an I.R. & F. begun in a decentralized way (i.e. in a neighborhood branch library) be made applicable to and/or serve as a base for a subsequent ...

Successful Federal Implemenation: The Erosion of Neighborhood Influences in Model Cities

This study of St. Louis' Model Cities program argues that the barriers to effective intergovernmental implementation that are stressed in the literature did not prevent HUD from accomplishing its goal of weakening the influence of poverty-area neighborhood organizations in the program. HUD, primarily through its willingness to withhold Model Cities funds until the neighborhood organizations' role was weakened, was able to alter such factors as local political alignments and the disposition of local implementers rather than having these remain impediments to implementation. HUD was willing to push this course of action due to the exclusion of representatives of the poor from the HUD subsystem.

New Rulers in the Ghetto: The Community Development Corporation and Urban Poverty, Community Control of Economic Development: The Boards of Directors of Community Development Corporations and Examination of “Widespread Citizen Participation” in the Model Cities Program

New Rulers in the Ghetto: The Community Development Corporation and Urban Poverty, Community Control of Economic Development: The Boards of Directors of Community Development Corporations and Examination of “Widespread Citizen Participation” in the Model Cities Program