Business Elites & Urban Development
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The essays assembled by Scott Cummings in Business Elites and Urban Development constitute a response to the Reagan era's emphasis on the privatization of urban services and minimization of federal and even local government involvement in private sector development. The essays consist of critical responses and case studies, all of which question the ability of the private sector to effect a transformation of cities that would benefit most residents. For the most part the writers agree that existing programs are not effective either. But they are unconvinced that business elites can ever successfully address the root causes of the urban crises which, in so many cases, they either cause or exacerbate. They agree that the private sector will continue to have an even greater impact on American cities but argue that without greater control that impact will continue to be largely negative. In the first section the authors discuss development strategies in which municipal attractions or private enterprise itself are subsidized by the public. Whitt's analysis of the role of the performing arts in urban growth is inconclusive. Though he agrees that such undertakings add to the appeal of a city and will help facilitate the transition of downtowns into service centers, the effect will be small enough that the costs to the public should be carefully considered and, he notes, such a strategy will not, by itself, be enough to revitalize an area. Rosentraub dissects the mistaken n
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hat keeps employment up. But the cooperation between local business elites and government to attract further investment meant that they worked to keep taxes extremely low. Thus local businesses did not make even the most reasonable kinds of demands for services, as they would have in any ordinary situation. The city was acclaimed for its fiscal conservatism and did attract an incredible level of growth between the 1950s and the early 1980s. But this came at the cost of very limited city services, and a crumbling infrastructure of unrepaired streets, inadequate water and sewage systems, and police and fire departments incapable of meeting demand. In addition, lax regulation and semi-private control resulted in serious problems with toxic waste disposal and pollution. Houston provides a primer on how uncontrolled private investment creates urban problems. In the Houston of the 1980s the private sector could find most of the urban ills it claimed to want to escape in moving there. But Feagin concluded that they would be unwilling to pay the massive tax increases that would be needed to control these problems. Instead they would most likely deplore the situation and move elsewhere.
Hill and Indergaard describe the overwhelm
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Approximate Word count = 1350
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page)
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