The Fate of Cities: Urban America and the Federal Government, 1945–2000 by Roger Biles (review)

Roger Biles spent a lot of time in a lot of governmental and presidential archives. He is clearly one of those patient historians willing to relieve the rest of us of the tedious work of combing through official documents. The Fate of Cities offers a comprehensive overview of official positions, policy decisions, and legislative language relevant to cities in the United States between 1945 and 2000. The overviews are thorough and detailed enough for the reader to trust that the factual ground is fully covered. Each chapter profiles an administration and is framed in terms of the level of federal economic and political support for cities. It is assumed that administrations that shift support away from the federal center toward state and local peripheries, or embrace decentralization with regard to housing in particular, are simply anti-city. However, there is no argument or analytical position taken here.

It is fair to say that The Fate of Cities is purely descriptive. In fact, it seems Biles has worked to remove himself from the trace effects of his own words. Without a clear authorial voice, it is impossible to know how he interprets the pro-city/anti-city patterns he so carefully documents. Indeed, one is left wondering what he thinks of the fact that so many presidents seem to have been hostile or just indifferent to the unique problems facing American cities after World War II. There is also very little use of the scholarship of other urban historians and no use of the perspectives from relevant interdisciplinary urban scholars. In other words, there is no academic conversation. Facts and artifacts (transcripts, policies, laws) are left to speak for themselves. Readers of Technology and Culture certainly will find this problematic.

However, the patterns clearly laid out suggest that, during the period under review, only the administrations of Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson were distinctly pro-city. The rest, Republicans and Democrats alike, undermined, underfunded, and dismantled the efforts of this more progressive group. The progressives, if we can call them that, focused on issues ranging from slum clearance (Urban Renewal) to discrimination, low-income housing, and transportation. It was Lyndon Johnson who was the most successful in creating durable, structural responses at the federal level. More specifically, he got the Civil Rights Act of 1964 passed, created the Highway Trust Fund, Head Start, and the new cabinet-level department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), all of which still exist today (though sometimes in modified forms or under other names). Despite the changes he began through a sincere “war on poverty,” and in his various Great Society initiatives, he only ran for one full term and left office in frustration. Richard Nixon then proceeded to starve HUD and overtly abandon cities. The new motto became strengthen local government, which translates as: cities are local problems.

There are two more particular frustrations one feels from reading The Fate of Cities. First, why should we interpret more centralized solutions to urban problems, as so many presidents appear to have done, as inherently flawed? These are repeatedly dismissed as wasteful, bloated, and overly bureaucratic, which serves to legitimate the dominant alternative—leave it all to the private sector to resolve. And, second, what were the actual effects of these policies on cities? There is mention of the Watts riots of 1965 and the Los Angeles riots of 1992. But has there not been an effort to assess urban policies and programs within the federal government? Are there no non-partisan actors guiding federal priorities? Official partisan rhetoric courses heavily through The Fate of Cities, repeating aphorisms and false dichotomies like “public versus private,” “big government versus small government,” so it is up to the reader to sift the data and critically engage the historical relationship among partisan political language, the merits of official decision-making, and lived urban reality.

Biles...