Municipal disinvestment is a term in the United States which describes an urban planning process in which a city or town or other municipal entity decides to abandon or neglect an area. It can happen when a municipality is in a period of economic prosperity and sees that its poorest and most blighted communities are both the cheapest targets for revitalization as well as the areas with the greatest potential for improvement. It is when a city is facing urban decay and chooses to allocate fewer resources to the poorest communities or communities with less political power,A Plague on Your Houses: How New York Was Burned Down and National Public Health Crumbled by Deborah Wallace, Rodrick Wallace. 2001. (Note: fire chief interviewed in the BBC-TV special "The Bronx is Burning," in 1976.) and disenfranchised neighborhoods are slated for demolition, relocation, and eventual replacement. Disinvestment in urban and suburban communities tends to fall strongly along racial and class lines and may perpetuate the cycle of poverty exerted upon the space, since more affluent individuals with social mobility can more easily leave disenfranchised areas.
History New Deal and postwar era Out of the New Deal came the Public Works Administration, funding the construction of thousands of low-rent homes and infrastructure development. Meanwhile the Homeowners Refinancing Act, as well as the Wagner-Steagall Housing Act three years later, provided generous incentives and reimbursements aimed at Americans recovering from the Great Depression who could not yet afford to invest in equity. In the postwar era, returning veterans were seeking homes to start families."The House We Live In." Race: The Power of an Illusion, episode 3, written by Larry Adelman, edited by Llewellyn M. Smith, PBS, 2003. There was a period of intense residential expansion surrounding major US cities, and banks were gratuitously providing loans in order for families to afford moving there. It is in this new economic landscape where redlining, exclusionary zoning, and predatory lending flourished.
The programs that were then enacted provided more displacement than replacement, and the beginning years of housing and infrastructure development were defined by their clearance and destruction of communities. The Housing Act of 1949 increased the mandate for public housing, but in claiming to combat "slums" and "blight," it was worded so vaguely that those terms could have been applied to almost all post-Depression urban neighborhoods. What was intended to rebuild in decayed communities was used against poor but otherwise-flourishing neighborhoods by labeling them ghettos.
The Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956 extended demolition of neighborhoods with new roads cutting through the most vulnerable ones to create more direct arteries between the metropolitan and the downtown areas. Highway construction expanded upon the already--widening schism of urban poor and the suburban by further enabling white flight and reducing the focus on public transport.
Civil Rights Movement and Great Society During the postwar era, municipalities sought to grow enriched and modernized communities from the slums that they demolished. As the Civil Rights Movement was in full display through highway revolts and responses to racial violence, there was a growing mindset among urban planners that a communal-focused, people-first approach should be taken, along the same lines as community development handled by the recently enacted Peace Corps.
President Lyndon B. Johnson continued the policies of his predecessor, John F. Kennedy, by signing into law during his first year in office the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and soon a series of bills that comprised the foundation of what was termed the "War on Poverty" and "Great Society" despite the protests from Congress, which was largely against racial integration. The new philosophy of the administration focused intently on Community Action Agencies, fulfilled the demand from modernist social theorists and poured funding and resources into volunteer forces. The direction of policy was seen as some as a form of direct investment in impoverished and minority neighborhoods, in contrast to the previous focus on new construction.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan served as Assistant Secretary of Labor under the Johnson administration and was a primary influence on policy development. Stemming from his controversial Moynihan Report, many of the programs that were enacted within the war on poverty were intended to educate black and poor families to modernize their "culture." Government assistance, in the hundreds of millions of dollars, was intended for organic community growth, the nurturing of local governance, and a gradual transition from developing to developed urban regions. However, when municipalities shrank programs that they directly ran, the money was diverted to smaller unorthodox community action associations with unions or "social protest agendas." For example, in a community center funded by the Office of Economic Opportunity, the Black Panther Party started its development.
Change in urban development policy Johnson responded to the radicalization of Watts riots by ceding control of local Offices of Economic Opportunity to municipal authorities such as the mayor, a reversal of the original strategy of community-lead development; funding was reduced; and the practices of the offices and local community projects were more closely supervised. Moynihan was startled by what he perceived as the consequences of the war on poverty and changed his philosophy and its practice under Johnson. Moynihan found the social policies of the past decades naive in trying to fix the "tangled pathology," which he described in the white paper that he authored for the US Department of Labor, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, nicknamed the Moynihan Report. Under the Richard Nixon administration, Moynihan remained as Counselor to the President, where he further pushed for dismantling the Offices of Economic Opportunity. It is during that time that Moynihan suggested to Nixon that black communities be treated with a "benign neglect," a philosophy of action that would later be translated into the planned shrinkage policies of the 1970s and 1980s.
In 1981, during the Ronald Reagan administration, the OEO changed into the Office of Community Services and became put under the control of Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, who more tightly controlled its function.
Redlining
Exclusionary zoning
Benign neglect
Benign neglect is a policy proposed in 1969 by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who was then on President Richard Nixon's staff as an urban affairs adviser. While serving in this capacity, he sent Nixon a memo that suggested, "The time may have come when the issue of race could benefit from a period of 'benign neglect.' The subject has been too much talked about. The forum has been too much taken over to hysterics, paranoids, and boodlers on all sides. We need a period in which Negro progress continues and racial rhetoric fades."#1579 Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations (1989) The policy was designed to ease tensions after the Civil Rights Movement of the late 1960s. Moynihan was particularly troubled by the speeches of Vice-President Spiro Agnew. However, the policy was widely seen as the municipal disinvestment to abandon urban neighborhoods, particularly ones with a majority-black population, as Moynihan's statements and writings appeared to encourage, for instance, fire departments engaging in triage to avoid a supposedly-futile war against arson.
Planned shrinkage
Planned shrinkage is a controversial public policy of the deliberate withdrawal of city services to blighted neighborhoods as a means of coping with dwindling tax revenues. Planned shrinkage involves decreasing city services such as police patrols, garbage removal, street repairs, and fire protection from selected city neighborhoods. It has been advocated as a way to concentrate city services for maximum effectiveness given serious budgetary constraints, but it has been criticized as an attempt to "encourage the exodus of undesirable populations" and to open up blighted neighborhoods for development by private interests.
Planned shrinkage occurred in the South Bronx of New York City and in the city of New Orleans. The term was first used in New York City in 1976 by Housing Commissioner Roger Starr.The Living City by Roberta Brandes Gratz. Simon and Schuster 1989.
For example, in the South Bronx, many firehouses were closed from the 1960s to the 1980s. Although firehouses were shut down all over the city during this period, the average number of people per engine by was over 44,000 in the South Bronx compared to just 17,000 in Staten Island. Firehouses in the Bronx were closed even as the fire alarm rate rose during the 1960s and the 1970s. Many of those planning decisions can be tracked to models created by the Rand corporation.
Background During the 20th century, a boom in suburban growth caused in part by increased automobile use led to urban decline, particularly in the poorer sections of many large cities in the United States and elsewhere. A dwindling tax base depleted many municipal resources. A common view was that it was part of a "downward spiral" caused first by an absence of jobs, the creation of a permanent underclass, and a declining tax base hurting many city services, including schools. It was that interplay of factors that made change difficult. New York City was described as "so broke" by the 1970s, with neighborhoods that had become "so desperate and depleted" that municipal authorities wondered how to cope. Some authorities felt the process of decline was inevitable and, instead of trying to fight it, searched for alternatives. According to one view, authorities searched for ways to have the greatest population loss in the areas with the poorest non-white populations.
RAND study In the early 1970s, a RAND study examining the relation between city services and large city populations concluded that when services such as police and fire protection were withdrawn, the numbers of people in the neglected areas would decrease. There had been questions about many fires that had been happening in the South Bronx during the 1970s. One account, including the RAND report, suggested that neighborhood fires were predominantly caused by arson though a contrasting report suggested that arson was not a major cause. If arson was a primary cause, according to the RAND viewpoint, it did not make sense financially for the city to try to invest further funds to improve fire protection The RAND report allegedly influenced then US Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who used the report's findings to make recommendations for urban policy. In Moynihan's view, arson was one of many social pathologies caused by large cities, and he suggested that a policy of "benign neglect" would be appropriate as a response.
Case studies New York City