In tandem with his revenue sharing proposals, Nixon decentralized oversight of federal urban development programs away from Washington. Federal housing, highway, and urban renewal programs required a large, centralized bureaucracy to review applications and administer and monitor grants; dismantling that capacity was the final aspect of Nixon’s New Federalism. In 1970, Nixon issued an executive order that created Federal Regional Councils (FRCs) charged with improving interaction between federal agencies and the local governments. The FRC system created ten multistate regions, each with a regional office and staff, to coordinate the grant-making activities of federal agencies. Nixon also decentralized HUD to thirty-nine area offices, which had the authority to make final commitments for almost all HUD programs. After expanding the federal bureaucracy in a bid to “streamline” government, Nixon called for drastic federal personnel cuts in the summer of 1971. At HUD, the expansion and almost immediate contraction of staff, combined with a pay freeze, damaged staff morale and capabilities for much longer than the duration of the hiring freeze.95
Nixon invoked state and local autonomy to gain support for his attack on centralized planning. Like DREE and MSUA in Canada, general revenue sharing, block grants, and HUD’s decentralization fundamentally altered the relationship between the federal, state, and local governments. By minimizing federal “strings” on assistance programs, Nixon hamstrung federal agencies. He ensured that HUD officials “only had carrots and no sticks,” as one official complained, and made it difficult for federal agencies to implement a development agenda with a truly national scope. Instead, the federal government could shape national development patterns on a case-by-case basis only, by supporting projects proposed by the private sector or by quasi-public agencies.96 Under Trudeau and Nixon, Canada and the United States had set out on different paths but arrived at the same destination: greater decentralization of federal authority and an increased reliance on the private sector to carry out urban development. U.S. cities like Pittsburgh had already established institutional mechanisms for public-private partnerships as part of federal urban renewal programs. DREE and MSUA laid the groundwork for Canadian cities like Hamilton to pursue similar arrangements.
In coming decades, the U.S. and Canadian governments would use decentralization and privatization as mechanisms to justify funding reductions in distressed urban areas. Growth coalitions with postindustrial ambitions in Pittsburgh and Hamilton had to work within the parameters of government retrenchment initiated under Nixon and Trudeau. In Hamilton, public officials and civic leaders continued to look to Pittsburgh as a redevelopment model but struggled to form more than an ad hoc public-private partnership. In Pittsburgh, the political coalition that nurtured the city’s redevelopment partnership began to lay the foundation for its eventual transition to a growth partnership. But at end of the 1960s Hamilton’s postwar urban renewal program remained stalled, Pittsburgh’s was completed, and public officials and civic leaders seemed unsure about the future direction of their cities.
CHAPTER TWO
Forging Growth Partnerships
The 1970 census took Pittsburghers by surprise. Mayor Pete Flaherty, who had taken office that January, knew the city had lost residents—nearly 92,000—over the previous decade. But suburban mayors and county officials had not anticipated that the Pittsburgh metropolitan area would be the only one among the country’s twenty-five largest to lose population in 1970. The New York Times marked the occasion with a feature article that highlighted disparities between the recently completed Golden Triangle and Pittsburgh’s declining neighborhoods and mill towns. The Times reported that U.S. Steel was about to move into a gleaming new headquarters building downtown and that the Pirates would soon open a playoff series in Pittsburgh’s newly completed, state-of-the-art baseball stadium. Outside the Golden Triangle and in working-class neighborhoods near the city’s steel mills, however, local businessmen complained that their stores were closing and the city was becoming “a plywood jungle.” Flaherty fretted that Pittsburgh needed more taxpayers, telling the Times that the biggest problem facing his city was “financial survival—whether we can get through without going broke.” For Pittsburgh’s corporate leaders, however, slow growth and declining manufacturing jobs were signs of good things to come. In the eyes of local executives, the shift from manufacturing to nonmanufacturing employment heralded “a new era of white-collar stability for Pittsburgh as a service and distribution center.” One senior executive who had been “active in community affairs” confidently asserted, “the lack of growth lets you get your arms around the problem.”1
Pittsburgh’s population fell by about 15 percent between 1960 and 1970, but Hamilton’s increased by more than 30 percent over the same period, from approximately 385,000 in 1961 to nearly half a million in 1971. That year, city officials said that Hamilton had reached a crossroads between its industrial past and postindustrial future. Canada’s steel town, planners reported, “had undertaken ambitious programs to shed this role and develop strong commercial and cultural sectors.” They expected publicly funded urban renewal programs and private high-rise construction to revitalize downtown. The expansion of McMaster University, the establishment of Mohawk College, and the construction of a theater-auditorium complex signaled “that the educational and cultural side of Hamilton will be significant forces in shaping the city’s future.”2 The city’s economic development staff urged Mayor Vic Copps to pursue jobs in commercial and non-industrial sectors. “While manufacturing will always be the foundation of our city’s economy,” they noted, “in the future the big growth in our jobs will come from the service sector. Already the city’s economic base is changing and Hamilton should see its future growth and development spread out into the whole economic unit of which this city is the natural center.”3 Planners’ enthusiasm about Hamilton’s future was somewhat tempered, however, by their assessment that downtown building conditions remained “generally fair to poor.”4
Within a few years, public officials’ optimism was shattered by upheavals in the federal relationship with cities, made worse for Pittsburgh and Hamilton by the near-simultaneous restructuring of the international steel industry in the wake of the 1973 oil crisis. Between 1973 and the early 1980s recession, the basic steel industry experienced a series of crises of global overproduction.5 In the United States, integrated steel producers responded to changing competitive conditions by intensifying disinvestment practices already underway and laying off large portions of the workforce, shutting down mills in Pittsburgh, Youngstown, and Chicago. In Canada, the steel industry downsized and automated to remain competitive. On both sides of the U.S.-Canadian border, urban tax bases shrank as industrial and population decentralization accelerated, and local governments could no longer rely on predictable funding streams from higher levels of government.
In Pittsburgh and Hamilton, public officials responded to manufacturing decline and federal retrenchment from urban development by trying to form (in Hamilton) or resuscitate (in Pittsburgh) the public-private partnerships that, from their perspective, successfully remade manufacturing centers after World War II. They did so in a decade in which national policy formulation in the United States and Canada reflected common concerns about intergovernmental relations, the future of industrial cities, and the public versus private role in urban and economic development. In both countries, national policy orientations pointed toward accelerated privatization and decentralization by the end of the decade. The very different public-private partnerships that guided development in Pittsburgh and Hamilton over the course of the 1970s shaped—and were shaped by—national policymakers’