Bernard J. Frieden

Downtown malls and the city agenda

A shopping mall, new office towers, a convention center, an atrium hotel, a restored historic neighborhood. These are the civic agenda for downtown development in the last third of the twentieth century, a trophy collection that mayors want. Add a domed stadium, aquarium, or cleaned-up waterfront to suit the circumstances, and you have the essential equipment for a first-class American city. The showpieces on this list are useful as well as trendy. They help a city keep up with its competitors while also meeting some local need such as getting rid of an eyesore, saving a landmark, or creating a civic symbol. Although the projects rarely result from systematic forethought, they often fit together surprisingly well. Most serve a common function: restoring downtown as a center of economic activity. Baltimore illustrates the way a retail center links into a chain of projects spanning the decades. Its new downtown became an instant success with the opening of the Harborplace shops in 1980, but that success was 30 years in the making. Shoreline improvements around the Inner Harbor a new bulkhead, a landfill, marina, piers, public parks, and promenades date from a bond issue voted in 1948. Other projects that remade the core of Baltimore in stages include the 33-acre Charles Center office complex built in the 1960s; the Maryland Science Center, World Trade Center, and Convention Center in the 1970s; and the National Aquarium and Hyatt Regency Hotel that opened within a year after Harborplace. This was a costly series of projects, with the public sector bill along totalling more than

What have we learned from the housing allowance experiment

200 million. And although each has its special history, they feed off each other. The downtown agenda was more than a grab-bag of pet projects because of the steady interest of elected officials and business executives in strengthening the downtown economy. Business coalitions especially had a large stake in revitalizing the city center, and their support was unusually crucial for launching any large project. In deciding which projects to push, they usually threw their weight behind those that served an economic development purpose. The dozens of downtown retail centers built after 1970 were part of this total agenda, adding a fresh acrobatic act to a three-ring circus in the making. They thrilled the crowds, but their long-run impact at the box office is hard to separate from the rest of the show.

The Exclusionary Effect of Growth Controls

One of the biggest social experiments ever undertaken, the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s experimental housing allowance programme, began with great fanfare in 1973 and is ending quietly in 197940. It has involved more than 25,000 families in twelve metropolitan areas, at a cost that is expected to add up to US

The Consumer's Stake in Environmental Regulation:

170 million.’ Like most ambitious programmes, it owes its origin to the convergence of several different lines of thought about how government should cope with a problem. The problem in this case was how to improve housing conditions for low-income people. Two key ideas prompted the experiment. One was that the best way to help families who needed better housing was to give them money that they could use on their own, instead of building subsidised housing for them. The other was that the best way to learn how a new approach would work in practice was to conduct a large-scale social experiment, following a systematic design and using control groups to check the validity of the results.

Rethinking Neighborhood Strategies

Local government regulation of land development and homebuilding has become more complicated and more demanding in recent years. Most of the new control techniques can be used either to manage growth in an orderly way or to limit and discourage growth. A review of experience in Northern California reveals many instances in which techniques such as utility moratoria, development fees, growth quotas, environmental impact reviews, and environmental lawsuits have been used in ways that increase the cost of new housing. Among the direct cost impacts of growth controls, the most important result from the rapidly increasing development charges levied by many communities, and from the stretch-out of development time caused by local review procedures. Many growth controls also generate a series of indirect impacts likely to lead to far greater increases in the sales prices of new homes. Four indirect impacts likely to have major effects on house prices are redesign of housing developments to make them more acceptable to local interest groups; restriction of the supply of land available for homebuilding; restriction of competition among homebuilders; and reduction in the ability of homebuilders to increase their output during cyclical increases in consumer demand.

Design Review from the Inside

Local governments across the country have been enacting new growth control regulations, usually in the name of environmental protection. The effects of these new controls can be seen most clearly in northern California, where a large number of San Francisco suburbs have all tightened their restrictions on home building. The new control systems have made it easy for groups that oppose growth to block or curtail new housing developments. Growth control tactics and the environmental politics that surround them have succeeded in reducing the amount of housing built in many new developments, restricting competition among home builders, raising costs to consumers, and restricting the locational choices available to families with average incomes. At the same time, they have contributed little to the improvement of the public environment, but have protected many established suburban communities against the inconveniences of growth and the loss of open land. By blocking growth in locations close to job centers, opponents have shifted home building to the suburban fringe, where the environmental costs are usually greater.

Downtown, Inc.: How America Rebuilds Cities

America’s efforts to improve living conditions for the urban poor reached a low ebb in the 1980s, while a troublesome economy and federal aid cutbacks helped drive up the number of poor people for the first time in more than a decade. One indicator of new poverty was the reappearance of homeless people on the streets of American cities for the first time since the Great Depression. Federal interest in community development programs for poor neighborhoods, however, sank to a minimum level during the Reagan administration.

The environmental protection hustle

City governments have redefined their relationship to real estate development. Instead of regulating real estate ventures from a distance, many now act as coinvestors or cosponsors with private companies. City redevelopment agencies, for example, assemble land, contribute financing, and build infrastructure for private projects they want to promote. Port authorities, transportation agencies, and public land development corporations also act as codevelopers of private projects that are intended to serve a public purpose.