Robert B. Fairbanks

The failure of urban renewal in the southwest: From city needs to individual rights

Despite an initial interest in the slum clearance title of the Housing Act of 1949, three of the Southwests largest metropolises, Dallas, Phoenix, and Albuquerque, passed on these programs not only due to the tardiness of state enabling legislation but because of a changing political discourse that emphasized the rights of the individual over the needs of the larger community.

The Texas Exception: San Antonio and Urban Renewal, 1949-1965:

Although considerable scholarship documents the failures of urban renewal, little has been written on the challenges cities faced in implementing programs to address local needs. This article explores the political challenges of San Antonio in creating an urban renewal program. It demonstrates the role of the Housing Acts of 1949 and 1954 in stimulating the city’s planning processes in a political atmosphere otherwise hostile to expanded government functions.

The New Metropolitan Reality

No one can dispute the remarkable changes that have taken place in metropolitan America since World War II. I live in Arlington, Texas, a community that as late as 1950 was a small town of less than 8,000 residents. Now it has grown to be a suburban city of 359,000 within the Dallas–Fort Worth Metroplex, making it the fiftieth largest city in the United States. Located within the twelve-county Dallas–Fort Worth metropolitan area of 5.6 million residents, it is not only the home of an American League baseball team, the Texas Rangers, but also the site of the new football stadium for the Dallas Cowboys. In addition, it contains a massive regional shopping mall, a huge amusement park, and a large state university. Parked midway between Dallas and Fort Worth and just south of the DFW International Airport, Arlington covers nearly 100 square miles and is accessed by two major interstate highways. Despite this, it has no real newspaper, no traditional downtown, no public transportation, and much less of a sense of itself than traditional cities. Arlington and the Dallas–Fort Worth Metroplex represent the incredible transformation that has taken place in metropolitan America during the past sixty years with the massive growth and development of suburbia and exurbia along with the disappearance of dominant central cities. Such development has gained increasing attention from scholars, and the three books under review here reflect the growing maturity of that literature. All the authors focus in some way on the causes and consequences of what Professor Jon Teaford characterizes as the metropolitan revolution, the massive movement of people, business, and industry to the

Rethinking urban problems

Students of urban historyare quite familiar with the transformations that occurred in regard to planning and government in American cities between 1900 and 1930. By the first decade of the twentieth century, the city commission government and the city beautiful movement emerged as important tools in the search for order in American cities. That changed by the 1920s as those two earlier “solutions” became increasingly problematic to those looking for a more efficient government and an ordered environment. 1 In planning, the city beautiful movement—associated with grand boulevards and city centers, but also an effort to coordinate a variety of public works—was the rage in the first decade of the twentieth century but gave way to the city practical or city efficient planning movement by the end of World War I. Commission government followed a similar path. Although once securing the endorsement of Progressives such as Brand Whitlock, Seth Low, Theodore Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson, councilmanager government replaced commission government as the darling of reformers after World War I due to perceived structural weakness in the latter. 2

Review Essay: Two Cheers for Public Housing: the Tenants' View: J. S. FUERST, When Public Housing Was Paradise: Building Community in Chicago. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2005, xvi, 228, illustrations, notes, index,

The establishment of public housing in this country took place at a time when social theory embraced a type of cultural group determinism arguing that people were shaped by the culture of place. As a result, middle-class housing reformers felt that slums, characterized by heterogeneity, disorder, and lack of a healthy type of community, impeded poor people’s ability to improve their lives and discouraged any civic consciousness. Public housing sought to counter the influence of the slums by providing a more ordered and controlled environment, equipping the poor with the necessary tools to allow them to improve their lives and become civically engaged. Public housing was not open to the neediest, but admitted those that demonstrated the ability to benefit from the new environment and participate in the project’s efforts to promote better community. By the 1960s, cultural group deterministic social theory gave way to one that emphasized individual autonomy and the importance of fostering cultural individualism, thus undermining the assumptions of the earlier public housing movement. The goals changed from promoting better citizens to providing dwelling space and social services for all needy individuals—the deserving as well as the so-called “undeserving” poor. This occurred as urban redevelopment and highway building displaced thousands of citizens, mostly minorities, and the federal government limited funding for both the needed additional units and their upkeep, starting a downward spiral in the image and reputation of public housing.

20 paper. RHONDA Y. WILLIAMS, The Politics of Public History: Black Women's Struggles Against Inequality. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004, xiii, 306, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index,

No one can dispute the remarkable changes that have taken place in metropolitan America since World War II. I live in Arlington, Texas, a community that as late as 1950 was a small town of less than 8,000 residents. Now it has grown to be a suburban city of 359,000 within the Dallas–Fort Worth Metroplex, making it the fiftieth largest city in the United States. Located within the twelve-county Dallas–Fort Worth metropolitan area of 5.6 million residents, it is not only the home of an American League baseball team, the Texas Rangers, but also the site of the new football stadium for the Dallas Cowboys. In addition, it contains a massive regional shopping mall, a huge amusement park, and a large state university. Parked midway between Dallas and Fort Worth and just south of the DFW International Airport, Arlington covers nearly 100 square miles and is accessed by two major interstate highways. Despite this, it has no real newspaper, no traditional downtown, no public transportation, and much less of a sense of itself than traditional cities. Arlington and the Dallas–Fort Worth Metroplex represent the incredible transformation that has taken place in metropolitan America during the past sixty years with the massive growth and development of suburbia and exurbia along with the disappearance of dominant central cities. Such development has gained increasing attention from scholars, and the three books under review here reflect the growing maturity of that literature. All the authors focus in some way on the causes and consequences of what Professor Jon Teaford characterizes as the metropolitan revolution, the massive movement of people, business, and industry to the

29.95 hardcover

No one can dispute the remarkable changes that have taken place in metropolitan America since World War II. I live in Arlington, Texas, a community that as late as 1950 was a small town of less than 8,000 residents. Now it has grown to be a suburban city of 359,000 within the Dallas–Fort Worth Metroplex, making it the fiftieth largest city in the United States. Located within the twelve-county Dallas–Fort Worth metropolitan area of 5.6 million residents, it is not only the home of an American League baseball team, the Texas Rangers, but also the site of the new football stadium for the Dallas Cowboys. In addition, it contains a massive regional shopping mall, a huge amusement park, and a large state university. Parked midway between Dallas and Fort Worth and just south of the DFW International Airport, Arlington covers nearly 100 square miles and is accessed by two major interstate highways. Despite this, it has no real newspaper, no traditional downtown, no public transportation, and much less of a sense of itself than traditional cities. Arlington and the Dallas–Fort Worth Metroplex represent the incredible transformation that has taken place in metropolitan America during the past sixty years with the massive growth and development of suburbia and exurbia along with the disappearance of dominant central cities. Such development has gained increasing attention from scholars, and the three books under review here reflect the growing maturity of that literature. All the authors focus in some way on the causes and consequences of what Professor Jon Teaford characterizes as the metropolitan revolution, the massive movement of people, business, and industry to the