Saving America's Cities
Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the Bancroft Prize
In twenty-first-century America, some cities are flourishing and others are struggling, but they all must contend with deteriorating infrastructure, economic inequality, and unaffordable housing. Cities have limited tools to address these problems, and many must rely on the private market to support the public good.
It wasn’t always this way. For almost three decades after World War II, even as national policies promoted suburban sprawl, the federal government underwrote renewal efforts for cities that had suffered during the Great Depression and the war and were now bleeding residents into the suburbs. In Saving America’s Cities, the prizewinning historian Lizabeth Cohen follows the career of Edward J. Logue, whose shifting approach to the urban crisis tracked the changing balance between government-funded public programs and private interests that would culminate in the neoliberal rush to privatize efforts to solve entrenched social problems. A Yale-trained lawyer, rival of Robert Moses, and sometime critic of Jane Jacobs, Logue saw renewing cities as an extension of the liberal New Deal. He worked to revive a declining New Haven, became the architect of the “New Boston” of the 1960s, and, later, led New York State’s Urban Development Corporation, which built entire new towns, including Roosevelt Island in New York City.
Logue’s era of urban renewal has a complicated legacy: Neighborhoods were demolished and residents dislocated, but there were also genuine successes and progressive goals. Saving America’s Cities is a dramatic story of heartbreak and destruction but also of human idealism and resourcefulness, opening up possibilities for our own time.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Harvard historian Cohen (Consumers' Republic) charts the life and career of pugnacious urban planner Ed Logue in this methodical reappraisal of the successes and failures of postwar urban renewal. From his early days remaking postindustrial New Haven and Boston to his rise and fall as the head of the powerful New York State Urban Development Corporation, and finally his redemption in the burned-out streets of the South Bronx, Logue defied easy characterization. A committed New Dealer, he believed above all in the duty of the federal government to provide decent housing, yet he spearheaded new public-private funding schemes; he initially limited his community outreach to established interest groups, but later evolved his approach to more closely resemble grassroots participatory democracy. Cohen's lucid account provides insights into the convictions that drove Logue, from his commitment to racial integration to the working-class sympathies he developed as an Irish Catholic scholarship student at Yale College. Yet her central argument that the era of federal urban renewal was one of not only squandered promises, but real progress will be familiar to readers with an interest in the subject. The result is a sturdy biography that doesn't break new ground in the ongoing debate over urban policy.