Building the Open City? Residential Mobility and Urban Policy Innovation in the 1970s

Author: John Wesley Edwards

Dissertation School: Cornell University

Abstract:

In federal urban policy, the 1970s are most remembered for the major legislation of 1974 and the creation of Urban Action Grants (1977). However, the period following passage of the Housing and Community Development Act of 1974 was also as important – as a moment of policy formation and innovation that reflected a growing concern among urban activists, social scientists, and policy practitioners with the problems of concentrated urban poverty. This study will reconsider this debate. Specifically, it will explain the growing appeal of residential mobility of the inner city poor as a policy aim and suggest why federal policies to encourage residential mobility and deconstruction of poverty proved in practice to be conflictive and difficult to sustain.

As this study will demonstrate, the task of translating the abstract ideas of mobility and open residential choice into actual policies enhancing mobility and broadening choice is freighted with problems. The two federal mobility programs of the period, the Areawide Housing Opportunity Plan (AHOP) and the Residential Housing Mobility Program (RHMP) were short-lived. As the HUD policymakers of the 1970s – looking optimistically at the Gautreuax remedy for a national policy model –found, challenging urban spatial patterns even indirectly (through personal mobility) to reduce poverty concentration generates conflict. How to anticipate and address those problems and conflicts in constructing contemporary urban mobility programs like Moving to Opportunity remains a major policy challenge. The closing chapter of the study will place these contemporary efforts in the context of the precursor programs and the long debate about mobility.

The study will adapt the social-learning model of Peter A. Hall in explaining the pace of urban policy change. The bulk of the dissertation, though, will be a critical evaluation of AHOP and RHMP. This analysis will be adapted from the study of Michael J. Rich of CDBG allocation in Illinois. Budgetary and application data will lead to consideration of multiple decision points – local and federal – within the two programs. A more intensive study of Baltimore's participation in AHOP and the effective grass-roots opposition it generated there will lead to a more rigorous consideration of what Rich terms intergovernmental benefit coalitions.

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