Beyond Mobility:The Limits of Liberal Urban Policy

ABSTRACT:

Liberalism remains the dominant philosophical perspective underlying the development of urban public policy in the United States. At the heart of Liberal Urban Policy lies a Mobility Paradigm, which is marked by a strong emphasis on facilitating population movement as a means of addressing urban social problems. In this paper, I explicate the nature of this Mobility Paradigm across four key urban policy goals and then develop a critique of it. In its place, I offer one alternative—a Placemaking Paradigm—and discuss its contrasting conceptual attributes and policy implications. The Placemaking Paradigm points toward the nascent development of a Critical Urban Policy, which stands as an insurgent normative and empirical challenge to hitherto liberal dominance.

Notes

1 For discussions of this consensus, see Steinberg, 2010 and Imbroscio, 2008.

2 The literature reflecting this perspective is voluminous (for a recent illustration, see Briggs, Popkin, & Goering, 2010).

3 Although this claim is highly contested (see e.g., Gans, 2010; Imbroscio, 2008; Goetz & Chapple, 2010a, 2010b.)

4 See DeFilippis and Fraser (2010) for a delineation, explication, and insightful discussion of this consensus.

5 Interestingly, liberals writing from outside the realm of urban policy also have heralded HOPE VI. For example, Steven Hill’s liberal manifesto, 10 Steps to Repair American Democracy, which seeks to “restore faith in government,” cites the program as an “instructive example of smart government” (2006, p. 169, 179). “The Clinton Administration,”Hill (2006, p. 180) lauds, “guided by Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Henry Cisneros … broke up … concentrated poverty by tearing down the public housing complexes … .”

6 A (partial) list of critics includes Goetz and Chapple (2010a, 2010b), Williams (2003), Bennett and Reed (1999), Greenbaum, Hathaway, Rodriguez, Spalding, and Ward (2008), Crump (2002), Bennett, Smith, and Wright (2006), Manzo, Kleit, and Crouch (2008), Crowley (2009), and Steinberg (2010).

7 See, for example, Hartman (1991). As Schwartz (2006, p. 37) summarizes: “ … many suburban land use restrictions inflate the cost of housing.” However, he adds: “although land use regulation can increase the cost of housing, it is not certain that the removal of such regulations would make housing affordable to the lowest income households.”

8 See, e.g., Vigdor, 2009; Smith, 2010 and Feagin and Combs, 2001. For a brief review, see Maly, 2005.

9 For a notable exception, see especially the provocative essay by Smith (2010), aptly entitled “Integration: Solving the Wrong Problem.” Also see essays by Steinberg (2010) and Fullilove, Hernandez-Cordero, & Fullilove (2010).

10 And, while the program itself does not inherently require it, in practice those HOPE VI families exiting public housing to the private rental market (with or without a voucher) “experienced significant rates of residential mobility, with half moving twice in two years” (Crowley, 2009, p. 231). As the title of the Urban Institute report documenting this phenomenon puts it: “Hope VI’d and on the Move” (see Comey, 2007).

11 Such a social state, it should be noted, is inherent in the Mobility Paradigm itself, with its calls for solving urban problems by shuffling people through urban space. This residential instability would only be exacerbated by the possible need for multiple moves, but it is not wholly or primarily dependent on such moves.

12 On this point, also see Imbroscio (2006).

13 On this point, Goetz (2000), for example, insightfully refers to HOPE VI as “the new slum clearance.”

14 For an analogous perspective applied to the urban context, cf. Hartman (1984) and Imbroscio (2004).

15 There has been a burst of such scholarship in recent years. See, for example, the policy chapters in Davies and Imbroscio’s (2010) Critical Urban Studies, especially essays by DeFilippis and Fraser (2010), Goetz and Chapple (2010a), and Spinner-Halev (2010). Also see the penetrating work of Greenbaum and her collaborators (e.g., Greenbaum et al., 2008). Perhaps most interesting (and potentially most subversive of the liberal orthodoxy) have been the critical ripostes in three recent and important volumes that otherwise celebrate the ostensible virtues of Liberal Urban Policy. In this regard, see especially Pattillo (2009), Kelly (2009), Crowley (2009), Smith (2010), and Steinberg (2010).