Revealing the empowerment revolution: A literature review of the model cities program

Journal of Urban History

Volumn 38, Issue 1, 2012, Pages 173-192

  Weber, Bret A ^a   Wallace, Amanda ^b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF NORTH DAKOTA   (United States)

^b Renville and Burke County Social Services   (United States)

Author keywords

citizen participation; community organizing; Model Cities; race relations; War on Poverty

Indexed keywords

COMMUNITY ORGANIZATION; LITERATURE REVIEW; PLANNING LEGISLATION; POVERTY; URBAN HISTORY; URBAN PLANNING;

EID: 84855705483     PISSN: 00961442     EISSN: 15526771     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0096144211420653     Document Type: Review

References (88)

1. Ronald Lora, America in the 60's: Cultural Authorities in Transition (New York: John Wiley, 1974), 93;
2. for the influence of the cold war on federal poverty policies, also see Christopher T. Fisher, "-The Hopes of Man': The Cold War, Modernization Theory, and the Issue of Race in the 1960s" (PhD diss., Rutgers University, 2002).
3. The term was maximum feasible participation in the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964; in the Demonstration Cities and Metropolitan Development Act the concept had been scaled back to "widespread citizen participation." Among the major authors to write about this concept and its shift between the programs, consider Senator Daniel P. Moynihan's Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding: Community Action in the War on Poverty (New York: Free Press, 1969);
4. and with a more specific perspective on the role of the concept in the Model Cities program, consider the classic article by Sherry R. Arnstein- HUD assistant secretary Ralph Taylor's chief staff advisor on citizen participation and HUD's chief reviewer of citizen participation proposals-"A Ladder of Citizen Participation," Journal of the American Institute of Planners 35, no. 4 (1969): 216-24.
5. Charles Haar, Between the Idea and the Reality: A Study in the Origin, Fate and Legacy of the Model Cities Program (Boston: Little, Brown, 1975), 57.
6. Demonstration Cities and Metropolitan Development Act, 42 U.S.C. - 103, 1256 (1966).
7. John Mitchell Sidor, Jr., "Comprehensive Planning in a Pluralist Environment: Model Cities Planning in Pittsburgh" (PhD diss., University of Pittsburgh, 1969).
8. Martin David Lowenthal, "The Politics of Planning in the Model Cities Program" (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1970).
9. Franklyn Lee Hruza, "Seattle Model Cities Program: A Case Study of Citizen Participation in the Planning Process During the Initial Planning Year, 1967-68" (PhD diss., University of Washington, 1972), 205, 220-22.
10. Robert A. Levine, The Poor Ye Need Not Have with You: Lessons from the War on Poverty (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), 22. Quote taken from the New York Times, April 29, 1969.
11. Ginger Rosenberg, "Model Cities-Dayton Plays the Game," in Edgar S. Dahn and Barry A. Passett, eds., Citizen Participation: Effecting Community Change (New York: Praeger, 1971), 273.
12. Bernard J. Frieden and Marshall Kaplan, The Politics of Neglect: Urban Aid from Model Cities to Revenue Sharing (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1975).
13. Haar, Between the Idea and the Reality, 195.
14. J. David Greenstone and Paul E. Peterson, Race and Authority in Urban Politics: Community Participation and the War on Poverty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, Russell Sage Foundation, Phoenix Edition, 1976), xv.
15. Charles Tantillo, "An Analysis of the Model Cities Program in Atlantic City, New Jersey" (PhD diss., Rutgers University, 1974).
16. Ricardo A. Millett, "Examination of -Widespread Citizen Participation' in the Model Cities Program and the Demands of Ethnic Minorities for a Greater Decision Making Role in American Cities" (PhD diss., Brandeis University, 1973).
17. Larry Richard Davis, "An Appraisal of Selected Economic Development Projects of the Texarkana, Texas Model Cities Program" (PhD diss., University of Arkansas, 1975).
18. Solomon G. Jacobson, "Implementation of a Federal Program at the Local Level: A Critique of the Introduction of the Model Cities Planning Program in Detroit" (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 1977).
19. Americo Martinez Cruz, "The Birth, Development, and Survival of Demonstration Programs and Their Impact on and Implications for Public Policy, Specifically Using Model Cities as a Prime Example" (PhD diss., New York University, 1978), 11.
20. Timothy J. Crimmins and Neil Larry Shumsky, "Clio's Stepchildren: Textbooks in American Urban History," Journal of Urban History 8 (August 1982): 77;
21. Anthony R. Sutcliffe, "Urban History in the Eighties: Reflections on the J. J. Dyos Memorial Conference," Journal of Urban History 10 (February 1984): 123-44;
22. Bruce M. Stave, "A Conversation with Sam Bass Warner, Jr.: Ten Years Later," Journal of Urban History 11 (November 1984): 83-111;
23. Allen F. Davis, "Jacob Riis and Urban Reform," Journal of Urban History 2 (May 1976): 377-79;
24. Seymour J. Mandelbaum, "Thinking about Cities as Systems: Reflections on the History of an Idea," Journal of Urban History 11 (February 1985): 139-50;
25. Stuart M. Blumin, "City Limits: Two Decades of Urban History in the JUH," Journal of Urban History 21 (November 1994): 7-30;
26. Carl Abbott, "Reading Urban History: Influential Books and Historians," Journal of Urban History 21 (November 1994): 31-43;
27. Stave, "A Conversation with Blaine A. Brownell, David Goldfield, and Raymond A. Mohl: Twenty Years of the Journal of Urban History," Journal of Urban History 21 (November 1994): 86-112;
28. Abbott, "Thinking about Cities: The Central Tradition in U.S. Urban History," Journal of Urban History 22 (September 1996): 687-701; (Pubitemid 126614197)
29. Charles Tilly, "What Good Is Urban History?" Journal of Urban History 22 (September 1996): 702-19; (Pubitemid 126614198)
30. Fred W. Viehe, "The Revival of Urban Politics: Pro-growth as an Organizing Theme for the Late Twentieth-Century City," Journal of Urban History 23 (July 1997): 657-65;
31. Steven M. Gillon, "The Future of Political History," Journal of Policy History 9 (1997): 240-55.
32. These include the following: William L. Hawkins Jr., "CDBG: A Practitioner Looks Back," Journal of Housing & Community Development 56 (Summer 1999): 26, simply lists quotes from various housing officials on the benefits of Community Development Block Grants (CDBGs) to housing development with two crediting the influence of earlier programs like Model Cities;
33. Suzanne McDevitt, "Social Work in Community Development: A Cross-National Comparison," International Social Work 40 (July 1997): 341-57, mentions Model Cities as one of the earlier influences on this new, widely used "strategy to alleviate problems in inner-city neighborhoods" Bernard J. Frieden, "The Urban Policy Legacy," Urban Affairs Review 30 (May 1995): 681, provides a brief overview of the legacy of past urban policies of which Model Cities is just one of many;
34. Peter Maier and David Nachmias, "An Evaluation of Community Development Block Grant Decision Making: Executive Dominance vs. Issue Networks," Policy Studies Journal 18 (Spring 1990): 573-90, focus on CDBGs, and credit their origination as a consolidation of seven categorical grant programs including Model Cities;
35. Bernard J. Frieden and Marshall Kaplan, "Model Cities and Project Renewal: Adjusting the Strategy to the 1980s," Policy Studies Journal 16 (Winter 1987): 377-83, compares Model Cities to a similar Israeli program, Project Renewal. There are numerous other references in what would seem to be pertinent journals that refer to "Model City" with no bearing on the Model Cities program.
36. Nonetheless, there were obviously numerous articles concerned with issues including poverty studies, social inequality, the historic roots of urban segregations, and federal urban policies-a partial sampling includes the following: Richard J. Hopkins, "Mobility and the New Urban History," Journal of Urban History 1 (February 1975): 131-47, which considers most of these concerns with an emphasis on rural origins, racial prejudice, and the effect of ghetto culture on family patterns to explain the slow progress of blacks and certain other ethnic groups; Journal of Urban History 3 (May 1977) includes reviews of work on the history of U.S. urban policies from 1915 to 1965;
37. John Bauman, "Housing the Poor," Journal of Urban History 6 (February 1980): 211-20, focuses on early-twentieth-century housing in Chicago and New York with an eye toward connecting those with the public housing policies of the urban renewal period that he refers to as 1950-1965;
38. Seymour J. Mandelbaum, "Urban Pasts and Urban Policies," Journal of Urban History 6 (August 1980): 453-83, takes an explicitly positivist approach by looking at the uses of history in the development of urban policies focusing on Kirkpatrick Sale's Power Shift: The Rise of the Southern Rim and Its Challenge to the Eastern Establishment, and a publication coauthored by Marshall Kaplan and the President's Urban and Regional Policy Group, A New Partnership to Conserve America's Communities: A National Urban Policy;
39. David Ment, "Corporations, Unions, and Blacks: The Struggle for Power in American Industrial Cities," Journal of Urban History 7 (February 1981): 247-54, includes a discussion of the election of the first black mayors of major American cities focusing on Richard Hatcher in Gary, Indiana, in 1967 and Coleman Young in Detroit, Michigan, in 1973;
40. David J. O'Brien and Mary Joan Roach, "Recent Developments in Urban Sociology," Journal of Urban History 10 (February 1984): 145-70, a historiographical essay that considers race and community, especially in inner-city black communities; Mandelbaum, "Thinking about Cities as Systems," is a discussion of the decline of the previously held hopes that urban history could serve as a guide for future policy makers;
41. Peter K. Eisinger, "The Search for a National Urban Policy, 1968-1980," Journal of Urban History 12 (November 1985): 3-23, is a rich examination of the legacy of revenue sharing with no mention of Model Cities.
42. John T. Cumbler, "Class, Race, and Survival: Politics in Hard Times," Journal of Urban History 18 (May 1992): 355-60.
43. Kenneth W. Goings and Raymond A. Mohl, "Toward a New African American Urban History," Journal of Urban History 21 (March 1995): 283-95, reviewed current literature and argued against a nationwide civil rights movement in favor of localized, independent struggles responding to local conditions as part of the larger trend to emphasize agency. In this way, those previously designated victims are shown as active participants in the construction of their history amid a "more diverse community with sharply etched divisions of class and culture"
44. Earl Lewis, "Connecting Memory, Self, and the Power of Place in African American Urban History," Journal of Urban History 21 (March 1995): 347-71;
45. Kenneth L. Kusmer, "African Americans in the City since World War II," Journal of Urban History 21 (May 1995): 458-504, a rich survey of the urban African American experience in the latter half of the century including highlights of the "Kerner Commission Report," and the Underclass Thesis;
46. Alice O'Connor, "Community Action, Urban Reform, and the Fight Against Poverty: The Ford Foundation's Gray Areas Program," Journal of Urban History 22 (July 1996): 586-625, examined the Ford Foundation's Grey Areas Program, recognizing that program's influence on War on Poverty programs. Notably, she recognized the theoretical shift from a focus "on social and economic restructuring to . . . what appeared to be a more tractable and ideologically acceptable target for change-the cultural deficiencies of the poor." (Pubitemid 126639843)
47. Thomas J. Sugrue, "More Than Skin Deep: Redevelopment and the Urban Crisis," Journal of Urban History 22 (September 1996): 750-59, reviews books by Herbert Gans, Jon Teaford, Bernard Freiden and Lynne Sagalyn, and Larry Bennert;
48. Peter B. Levy, "The Persistence of the Color Line," Journal of Urban History 24 (January 1998): 235-43, looks at politics in Chicago throughout the twentieth century, including the 1960s and the War on Poverty, with only a brief mention of Model Cities and a more extensive look at the city's Community Action Program, and Levy's review considers Daley's role in making the federally funded urban programs crucibles of backlash, as the mayor used white reaction to the city's racial conflicts and the related function of federal intervention;
49. Michael B. Katz, "Segmented Visions: Recent Historical Writing on American Welfare," Journal of Urban History 24 (January 1998): 244-55.
50. Furthermore, the disregard of Model Cities persisted even with the published interview with Charles Haar, who was both a member of the committee that drafted the Model Cities legislation and one of the few authors to devote a single book to the topic: see Viehe, "Revival of Urban Politics,"
51. and Charles Haar, "Thinking the Unthinkable about Our Cities," Journal of Urban History 25 (November 1998): 57-74.
52. Pertinent examples include the following: David Farber and Beth Bailey, eds., The Columbia Guide to America in the 1960s (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), which, despite multiple references to the Community Action Programs, contains only one reference to Model Cities, stating that the Great Society was primarily aimed at cities and that these two programs were meant to "increase -community competence' and ensure that being from a bad neighborhood did not trap someone in a -culture of poverty'" (ibid., 100);
53. James S. Olsen, ed., Historical Dictionary of the 1960s (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1999), makes no mention of either Model Cities or the Demonstration and Metropolitan Development Act; Carl Singleton, ed., The Sixties in America (Hackensack, NJ: Salem Press, 1999), makes two references about Model Cities as "being bogged down in squabbles between federal and local agencies" (ibid., 324, 360), and declares that the program had no major lasting effect on "urban renewal problems, [but] did make participation by residents and concerned citizens a part of many future government projects" (ibid., 749).
54. Allen J. Matusow, The Unraveling of America: A History of Liberalism in the 1960s. The New American Nation Series (New York: Harper Torch Books, 1984)
55. Edward P. Morgan, The 60s Experience: Hard Lessons about Modern America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991), 21.
56. David Farber, ed., The Sixties: From Memory to History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 4.
57. A representative sampling includes Diana M. DiNitto, Social Welfare: Politics and Public Policy, 5th ed. (Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 2000), which mentions Model Cities explicitly, noting that it took "the comprehensive, or community-building approach" by seeking "to collaborate and coordinate programs and sectors to encourage a multifrontal attack on poverty" (ibid., 291), but then fails to list it along with "the most important" Great Society programs;
58. Bruce S. Janson, The Reluctant Welfare State: American Social Welfare Policies-Past, Present, and Future (Pacific Grove, CA: Brooks/Cole, 2001), affords some space to the War on Poverty, and even to the specific history of the Community Action Programs' mandate for "maximum feasible participation of the poor," but never mentions Model Cities, and then further ignores it with the fallacious claim that "[a]lmost all Great Society reforms had been enacted in two years, 1964 and 1965" (ibid., 258);
59. Howard Jacob Karger and David Stoesz, American Social Welfare Policy: A Pluralist Approach, 5th ed. (Boston: Pearson, 2006), contains multiple, generally favorable-though relatively short-mentions of President Johnson's Great Society, including a brief description of citizen participation in the Community Action Programs, but no mention whatsoever of Model Cities;
60. Theda Skocpol, Social Policy in the United States: Future Possibilities in Historical Perspective (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), despite addressing the War on Poverty and Great Society in terms of listing the programs, "response to black voters," and the success of the various efforts, including recognition that "newly upwardly mobile black politicians and middle-class professionals also gained employment opportunities through these efforts" (ibid., 221; some of the most significant gains of the program), Model Cities is never explicitly mentioned;
61. Walter I. Trattner, From Poor Law To Welfare State: A History of Social Welfare in America, 6th ed. (New York: Free Press, 1994), closely examines a number of specific War on Poverty programs, including an extensive discussion of both the "culture of poverty" theoretical base and the controversies around citizen participation, but mentions the Demonstration Cities and Metropolitan Development Act only amid a listing of related programs.
62. Jill Quadagno, How Racism Undermined the War on Poverty: The Color of Welfare (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 49, 90, 103-5.
63. Terry Anderson, The Sixties (New York: Longman, 1999), 71, 76.
64. Paul Lococo, "Participatory Democracy at the Grassroots: The Honolulu Neighborhood Boards" (PhD diss., University of Hawaii, 1998, iii).
65. Robert Allen Catlin, "The Dynamics of Program Transfer from Model Cities to Community Development Block Grant in St. Paul, Minnesota" (PhD diss., Claremont Graduate University, 1977).
66. Albert K. Karnig and Susan Welch, Black Representation and Urban Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980);
67. George Brager and Harry Specht, Community Organizing (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969);
68. George J. Washnis, Community Development Strategies: Case Studies of Major Model Cities (New York: Praeger, 1974).
69. Nicholas Lemann, The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America (New York: Knopf, 1991), 187-99.
70. David R. Goldfield, "Black Political Power in the Urban South," in Arnold R. Hirsch and Raymond A. Mohl, eds., Urban Policy in Twentieth-Century America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1993), 165-70.
71. Additional articles not discussed explicitly in this text include Wendell E. Pritchett, "Which Urban Crisis? Regionalism, Race, and Urban Policy, 1960-1974," Journal of Urban History 34 (January 2008): 266-86. While only minimally addressing Model Cities, it does include an account of the passage of the Demonstration Cities and Metropolitan Development Act of 1966 as a response to the riots and violence of the preceding summer; (Pubitemid 350284146)
72. Matthew J. Countryman, "-From Protest to Politics': Community Control and Black Independent Politics in Philadelphia, 1965-1984," Journal of Urban History 32 (September 2006): 813-61, records the incident when HUD announced it was discontinuing funding for the Philadelphia Model Cities program and the Third Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of the Area Wide Council that the federal and city governments were not abiding by citizen participation requirements;
73. Mahyar Arefi, "An Asset-Based Approach to Policymaking: Revisiting the History of Urban Planning and Neighborhood Change in Cincinnati's West End," Cities 21 (December 2004): 491-500, whose focus is a comparison of asset-based versus need-based decision-making processes, and it references Model Cities as one of four urban programs in Cincinnati, Ohio's, West End; (Pubitemid 39621434)
74. Kenneth J. Heineman, "Model City: The War on Poverty, Race Relations, and Catholic Social Activism in 1960s Pittsburgh," Historian 65 (Summer 2003): 867, looks at the influence of Catholic Social Activism on 1960s antipoverty programs with a focus on white resentment.
75. Robert Self, "-To Plan Our Liberation': Black Power and the Politics of Place in Oakland, California, 1965-1977," Journal of Urban History 26 (September 2000): 782-85. In addition to Wilson's training with the Community Action Program, Elaine Brown's electoral experience and defeat were gained in direct relation to her connection with the Model Cities program. Self credits Brown's role in creating "a key ideological and organizational bridge," as well as "her tireless grassroots campaigning, and her capacity to forge productive working relationships [as] central to the coalition that elected Wilson in 1977" (ibid., 785).
76. Robert Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 242.
77. Alice O'Connor and Gwendolyn Mink, eds., Poverty in the United States: An Encyclopedia of History, Politics, and Policy: (Oxford, UK: ABC/CLIO, 2004), 271.
78. Walter Thabit, How East New York Became a Ghetto (New York: New York University Press, 2003), 138.
79. Harvey K. Flad and Clyde Griffen, Main Street to Mainframes: Landscapes and Social Change in Poughkeepsie (Albany, N.Y.: Excelsior Editions, 2009)
80. Guian A. McKee, "-I've Never Dealt with a Government Agency Before': Philadelphia's Somerset Knitting Mills Project, the Local State, and the Missed Opportunities of Urban Renewal," Journal of Urban History 35 (2009): 395.
81. Kent Germany, "Making a New Louisiana: American Liberalism and the Search for the Great Society in New Orleans, 1964-1974" (PhD diss., Tulane University, 2000), 465.
82. Bret A. Weber, "Denver's Model Cities Program" (PhD diss., University of Utah, 2007)
83. Linda Hurley Ishem, "Toward Equitable Development: Theorizing the Tensions That Arise in Redeveloping Urban Neighborhoods" (PhD diss., University of Washington, 2008), 151-52.
84. John Sasso and Priscilla Foley, eds., A Little Noticed Revolution: An Oral History of the Model Cities Program and Its Transition to the Community Development Block Grant Program (Berkeley, California: Regents of the University of California, 2005)
85. Mike Miller, A Community Organizer's Tale: People and Power in San Francisco (Berkeley, California: Heyday Books, 2009).
86. Mark Tigan, "Citizen Participation in United States Department of Housing and Urban Development Programs: From the Great Society to the New Federalism" (PhD diss., University of Massachusetts, 2005)
87. Deborah A. Jackson, "Where Do We Go From Here? Community Participation and Empowerment in the Empowerment Zone: Atlanta, 1994-2002" (PhD diss., Southern New Hampshire University, 2009)
88. Lemann, The Promised Land, 344.