A City without Slums: Urban Renewal; Public Housing and Downtown Revitalization in Kansas City, Missouri

American Journal of Economics and Sociology, The,  Jan, 2001  by Kevin Fox Gotham

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As an ideology and political strategy, privatism has been the mechanism through which public policy and planning has traditionally reinforced social inequalities by dispensing public resources unequally (Gotham 2000; Squires 1994). In his historical account of urban development in the United States, Sam Bass Warner argues that "[w]hat the private market could do well, American cities have done well; what the private market did badly, or neglected, our cities have been unable to overcome" (1968, p. x). Evan McKenzie argues in Privatopia: Homeowner Associations and the Rise of Residential Private Government that "private developers and businessmen, rather than government, have long been the dominant forces in American urban planning" (1994, p. 7). The most activist public policies on housing, land-use regulation, and suburban development have historically involved insuring real estate firms and developers "against the consequences of their own mistakes so that profits remained in private hands while losses wer e socialized" (p. 104). Similarly, Dennis Judd (1984, pp. 412-413) maintains that "American urban growth has always been dictated by private institutions and not by public policies," because public policy "follows rather than precedes the activities of the entrepreneurs who have changed the urban landscape." Sociologists John Logan and Harvey Molotch (1987) observe that urban "growth machines" are composed mainly of private real estate interests, with local government officials playing a subservient role, operating as facilitators of private economic growth and development. Extensive research by Joe Feagin (1988) in his case study of growth politics in Houston suggests that while government officials are important actors in the land development process, the role of government is largely promotional rather than regulatory or directive.

Until now, few scholars have specified the role of the ideology of privatism in determining the programmatic shape and local implementation of urban renewal or have examined the impact of the program on metropolitan development. A number of historical studies have documented the role of powerful actors, such as urban mayors (Teaford 1990), federal officials and "political entrepreneurs" (Mollenkopf 1983), and real estate officials, in the development of postwar urban renewal and redevelopment (Weiss 1980; see Hirsch 1993 and Mohl 1993 for overviews). However, these studies have failed to theorize the relationship between the actions of powerful political and economic actors and the broader political economy of urban redevelopment, as well as the impact of privatism in shaping the urban redevelopment policy making process. A number of neo-Marxian scholars have attempted to develop a theoretical understanding of the role of urban renewal and public housing in the process of capital accumulation and labor contr ol (Sawyers 1984; Cummings 1988). While these scholars have highlighted the unequal effects of the "capitalist" context of public policy, their accounts have been reductionistic--overemphasizing the power of class at the exclusion of other salient factors (race, gender, politics, culture, and ideology, among others), and homogenizing and totalizing the interests of "capital" by stressing its "need" for public coordination to maximize profits. Marxian scholars have made impressive contributions to the study of the land development process, the economic context of public policy, and the capitalist dynamics of urban credit markets (Gordon 1984; Storper 1984; Storper and Walker 1983; Castells 1977, 1983; Harvey 1973, 1976; Scott 1988). However, Marxian accounts have little to say about the political context of urban redevelopment and the ideology of privatism because these are not particularly relevant to the capitalist production process per se.