When I taught American Government and studied the Constitution with my students, I would ask them this question: What does the U.S. Constitution say about the role of cities? It’s a trick question because the answer is: “nothing.” Cities (or local governments) are not mentioned in the U.S. Constitution, which is essentially a pact between thirteen states to agree to the rules of a national government. Local governments are created by the states; and throughout most of this country’s history, federal policies have had little direct effect on city governance.

This changed, gradually at first, with a few discrete programs in the early part of the 20th century, and then more drastically from the 1930s onward. The reasons behind an increased federal role in city life, and in domestic policy more broadly, are complex and the topic of federal engagement has become a source of tension between parties, regions, and ideologies over the years. But for our purposes, we can identify a few key trends.

The extent of deprivation experienced during the Great Depression — one third of the labor force was unemployed, a staggering percentage — led to the adoption of a range of federal policies to help individuals and places. The specific urban programs of the Great Depression are discussed below, but the creation of programs, like Social Security as well as unemployment programs, changed the relationship between the federal government and its citizens.

Something changed in the U.S. in the 1920s that shaped politics moving forward. As of the 1920 census, a majority of Americans lived in metropolitan, rather than rural areas. By the 1932 election, this new urban majority had become a key constituency of the Democratic party. Federal policies had long found ways to support rural residents and agriculture as elected representatives sought to bring benefits to their constituents. It’s not surprising the elected officials representing these growing urban areas would seek to do the same. The 1932 election cemented the Democratic coalition of fairly liberal urban voters and the Democratic South until in the 1970s.

The long list of domestic policies initiated during the lengthy Franklin Roosevelt administration are together labeled the “New Deal.” Of course, cities suffered from unemployment and thus benefited from various national relief programs, but we also find specific programs focused on rebuilding an urban infrastructure that had been in need of improvement for decades. The goal of such programs was two-fold — to employ people, and to improve urban infrastructure. If we look across the country, we can find train stations, bridges, and park structures all created with New Deal funds. We also find the first efforts to build publicly subsidized housing, starting with a few projects initiated by local governments with federal funds, and then moving to the creation of the U.S. Housing Authority to carry out a more ambitious national program. But, the Supreme Court declared that the federal government did not have the power to seize land for the purposes of building housing. This put an end to the U.S. Housing Authority; future public housing efforts would have to be carried out locally.

One of the most important pieces of urban legislation was the Housing Act of 1949. It is known for two programs: Title I — which provided funding for the Urban Renewal program; and Title III — which authorized federal funds for the public housing program. Both of these are still in effect today.

The Housing Act of 1949 picked up on the efforts which began during the New Deal. The Supreme Court struck down the federal public housing program, but left open the possibility that local governments could have the authority to use eminent domain powers to take land and manage housing. To this end, Congress authorized a public housing program through which federal funds would be provided to local housing authorities created voluntarily by municipal governments. From its inception, this program was an uneasy compromise between those who considered decent, affordable housing to be a basic social need, which included labor unions, liberal reformers, and many big city officials, and those for whom housing should remain a market good, provided without government involvement, including rural conservatives and the real estate industry. To appease critics, the Public Housing program included provisions to ensure that government housing would not compete with the private housing market. For example, only those with the lowest incomes would be eligible for public housing. Moreover, Congress has never fully funded the program. As a result, public housing has largely served as a tool of segregation; with very poor and largely minority residents concentrated in often poorly designed communities. Because of the local nature of the program, more affluent areas simply opt out. As we’ll discuss further in our class on segregation, public housing has served to exacerbate problems of inequality.

The purpose of the Urban Renewal program was to help cities revitalize their central business districts. In many cities, little new investment had occurred during the Depression or World War II. Competition with newer suburban areas was hampering reinvestment efforts. Big city mayors, downtown businesses and labor unions all pushed Congress to help inject funds into urban areas. Here’s how the program worked. First, cities created urban renewal authorities with power to use eminent domain to acquire properties deemed “blighted”, which was defined by such indicators as diminished property values. The city would demolish structures and then either re-use for a public purpose or turn the land over to a private developer, usually at nominal costs, for redevelopment. Cities were then reimbursed by the federal government for most of these costs.

The problems associated with urban renewal are many. For starters, the “blighted” areas that were cleared were often home to thousands of families who had few other options. In the 1950s alone, urban renewal in NYC destroyed 126,000 units of housing, and only 28,000 public housing units were built to replace them. Those displaced by urban renewal were almost all poor, and mostly black- critics re-named the program “Negro Removal”.

Second, city officials were often bad at reading the market; too often they bought and cleared land only to find that no developer was interested in it. Many cities have large vacant tracts that lie fallow for decades thanks to poorly conceived urban renewal plans. For example, the City of Tampa cleared many blocks in historic Ybor City in the 1960s, in anticipation of private development that never came. Eventually the Ybor campus of Hillsborough Community College was built there. The very impressive Barclay’s Center in downtown Brooklyn is part of a complex that was built around 2010 — but the land on which it sits was cleared for redevelopment forty years earlier! The disconnect between urban renewal planning and redevelopment was in part what motivated the Norton Long article we read earlier.

While the legacy of urban renewal hasn’t been entirely negative — some highly successful project such as New York’s Lincoln Center were built with urban renewal funds — it’s largest legacy has probably been as a lesson on how not to revitalize cities. Since then, large-scale displacement and demolition have become both legally and politically less feasible. And, the idea that urban cores are best redeveloped through massive projects built on mega-blocks has also fallen out of favor.

A host of social services and urban development programs were launched under Lyndon Johnson in the 1960s under the label the “Great Society.” By one count there were 399 new federal programs for cities in 1966, up from 44 in 1960, a sign of how engaged with urban issues the federal government had become. Among the most important specific programs of era were the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, and the Demonstration Cities and Metropolitan Development Act of 1966 (usually known as “Model Cities.”) Both these, and other great society federal programs sought to address social needs of city inhabitants, including educational programs, training, legal services, as well as to commit federal funds for physical rehabilitation. Also, the programs associated with the Great Society required recipient cities to establish independent organizations to plan programs — organizations elected by neighborhood people and requiring “maximum feasible participation.” Critics, especially those working from a conservative perspective, have condemned these programs because they did not, obviously, defeat poverty, but they were a part of what enabled communities of color to mobilize politically, and they did leave a legacy of community-based organizations that still play an important role in stabilizing lower income communities.

By the 1970s, the era of big federal urban initiatives was over. As Place Matters describes, under presidents like Nixon and Reagan, urban programs were curtailed, and restructured into revenue sharing and block grant arrangements with state and local officials. Even under Democratic administrations, federal interventions into cities were far less ambitious.

However, just because we’ve seen fewer federal programs that are tagged as “urban” doesn’t mean federal policies have become less significant for local policy. Indeed, some would argue that cities have been shaped most significantly by federal policies that were not intended to shape cities. For example, federal transportation and highway building programs were created in the 1950s to improve mobility and even, in part, to improve national security — military leaders feared, quite literally, that we would be slow to respond to an attack because key personnel and equipment would be stuck in traffic! But, highways have completely transformed the metropolitan landscape, both by facilitating suburbanization, and by destroying inner city neighborhoods to make room for those roadways.

Immigration policies, welfare policies, environmental policies are great examples of federal initiatives designed to meet national goals, but which ultimately come to create both problems and opportunities for cities.

The authors of Place Matters take on the typical popular understanding of 20th

century metropolitan area development, which sees the huge shift of the population from central city to suburb, and more or less at the same time from northeast or rustbelt to sunbelt, as the result of market forces and personal preferences. In what I’ll call the traditional view, families moving out of dense industrial cities to suburban single family homes was a natural outgrowth of choice and affluence. Who wouldn’t prefer a 3 bedroom colonial surrounded by a lawn to an apartment or row house? Isn’t that the “American Dream?”

But, the authors of Place Matters, like many other urban scholars, see these seemingly individual choices as framed by a host of larger structural factors, including government policy. Those suburban choices would be less appealing if the federal government hadn’t underwritten massive highway construction. And, home ownership would be less accessible if homeowners were unable to deduct mortgage interest and property taxes from their federal income tax.

Moreover, the authors argue that there are explicit and implicit racial dimensions to this story. The federal government certainly didn’t create racial prejudice or discrimination, but federal policies certainly didn’t help, whether through explicit action — e.g. creating a public housing program that exacerbated segregation — or inaction, e.g. being very slow to enforce housing discrimination laws.

In the end, planners and local policy managers are well advised to have a full understanding of the local impacts of federal policies. This topic will be further explored on the Theory to Practice discussion board.