Municipal disinvestment
Municipal disinvestment is a term in the United States which describes an urban planning process in which a city or town or other municipal entity decides to abandon or neglect an area. It can happen when a municipality is in a period of economic prosperity and sees that its poorest and most blighted communities are both the cheapest targets for revitalization as well as the areas with the greatest potential for improvement.[1] It is when a city is facing urban decay and chooses to allocate fewer resources to the poorest communities or communities with less political power,[2] and disenfranchised neighborhoods are slated for demolition, relocation, and eventual replacement. Disinvestment in urban and suburban communities tends to fall strongly along racial and class lines and may perpetuate the cycle of poverty exerted upon the space, since more affluent individuals with social mobility can more easily leave disenfranchised areas.[3]
History[edit]
New Deal and postwar era[edit]
Out of the New Deal came the Public Works Administration, funding the construction of thousands of low-rent homes and infrastructure development. Meanwhile the Homeowners Refinancing Act, as well as the Wagner-Steagall Housing Act three years later, provided generous incentives and reimbursements aimed at Americans recovering from the Great Depression who could not yet afford to invest in equity. In the postwar era, returning veterans were seeking homes to start families.[4] There was a period of intense residential expansion surrounding major US cities, and banks were gratuitously providing loans in order for families to afford moving there. It is in this new economic landscape where redlining, exclusionary zoning, and predatory lending flourished.
The programs that were then enacted provided more displacement than replacement,a nd the beginning years of housing and infrastructure development were defined by their clearance and destruction of communities.[1] The Housing Act of 1949 increased the mandate for public housing, but in claiming to combat "slums" and "blight," it was worded so vaguely that those terms could have been applied to almost all post-Depression urban neighborhoods. What was intended to rebuild in decayed communities was used against poor but otherwise-flourishing neighborhoods by labeling them ghettos.[1]
The Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956 extended demolition of neighborhoods with new roads cutting through the most vulnerable ones to create more direct arteries between the metropolitan and the downtown areas. Highway construction expanded upon the already--widening schism of urban poor and the suburban by further enabling white flight and reducing the focus on public transport.
Civil Rights Movement and Great Society[edit]
During the postwar era, municipalities sought to grow enriched and modernized communities from the slums that they demolished. As the Civil Rights Movement was in full display through highway revolts and responses to racial violence, there was a growing mindset among urban planners that a communal-focused, people-first approach should be taken, along the same lines as community development handled by the recently-enacted Peace Corps.[5]
President Lyndon B. Johnson continued the policies of his predecessor, John F. Kennedy, by signing into law during his first year in office the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and soon a series of bills that comprised the foundation of what was termed the "War on Poverty" and "Great Society" despite the protests from Congress, which was largely against racial integration.[1] The new philosophy of the administration focused intently on Community Action Agencies, fulfilled the demand from modernist social theorists and poured funding and resources into volunteer forces.[5] The direction of policy was seen as some as a form of direct investment in impoverished and minority neighborhoods, in contrast to the previous focus on new construction.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan served as Assistant Secretary of Labor under the Johnson administration and was a primary influence on policy development. Stemming from his controversial Moynihan Report, many of the programs that were enacted within the War on Poverty were intended to educate black and poor families to modernize their "culture." Government assistance, in the hundreds of millions of dollars, was intended for organic community growth, the nurturing of local governance, and a gradual transition from developing to developed urban regions. However, when municipalities shrank programs that they directly ran, the money was diverted to smaller unorthodox community action associations with unions or "social protest agendas." For example, in a community center funded by the Office of Economic Opportunity, the Black Panther Party started its development.[5]
Change in urban development policy[edit]
Johnson responded to the radicalization of Watts riots by ceding control of local Offices of Economic Opportunity to municipal authorities such as the mayor, a reversal of the original strategy of community-lead development; funding was reduced; and the practices of the offices and local community projects were more closely supervised.[5] Moynihan was startled by what he perceived as the consequences of the War on Poverty and changed his philosophy and its practice under Johnson. Moynihan found the social policies of the past decades naive in trying to fix the "tangled pathology," which he described in the white paper that he authored for the US Department of Labor, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, nicknamed the Moynihan Report.[1][5][6] Under the Richard Nixon administration, Moynihan remained as Counselor to the President, where he further pushed for dismantling the Offices of Economic Opportunity.[5] It is during that time that Moynihan suggested to Nixon that black communities be treated with a "benign neglect," a philosophy of action that would later be translated into the planned shrinkage policies of the 1970s and 1980s.
In 1981, during the Ronald Reagan administration, the OEO changed into the Office of Community Services and became put under the control of Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, who more tightly controlled its function.[5]