Postwar Urban America : Demography, Economics, and Social Policies

This book presents an analytical history of postwar urban America as a drama in four acts, with the goal of identifying the demographic, economic, and political factors that gave rise to positive outcomes. After a brief transition to peacetime, urban America experienced robust growth from 1950 until roughly 1970. The end of this first act was announced years in advance when riots erupted in the Watts section of Los Angeles in August 1965. There were many signs of trouble brewing in urban areas, and the blizzard of programs that was the Great Society was partly in response to those problems. The decline of the major cities and the attendant social problems were all related and reinforced one another during these years. Act 2 was a bad time for cities and the people who lived in them, but it did end, and sometime after 1990, the downward spiral that had gripped America's cities stopped and Act 3 began. To be sure, urban America still suffered from many problems, but many things were getting better, not worse-for example, the murder rate in the United States dropped to levels that had not been seen since before the start of the urban crisis in the mid-1960s. It was time to focus on what was working and how to keep the momentum of social and economic progress going. Unfortunately, however, Act 4 brought a reversal of the hopeful trends of the 1990s, as a relatively small recession in 2001 was followed by a weak recovery. Then came the financial crisis of 2008 and the deepest recession since the Great Depression, with across-the-board increases in poverty. A primary task of this book is to study the major urban areas of the United States to understand why this all happened the way it did. The method followed is to identify seventeen urban areas in the North, fifteen in the South, and eight in the West and then study them from 1950 to 2010. Most of the chapters present detailed examinations of either the northern urban areas or the urban areas in the South and West during one of the "acts" in the drama-the time periods we call growth, crisis, rebirth, and new century. The hope is that this analysis will help stimulate the thinking that is needed to recognize that some urban areas have been more successful than others, that a rebirth did take place in urban America in the 1990s, and that the task going forward is to nurture and enhance the positive forces that can play a role once again. Book jacket.