Cities of Amber: Antigrowth Politics and the Making of Modern Liberalism

Abstract

The skyrocketing cost of living in cities from New York to San Francisco is an issue of enormous consequence in American life today. Yet its historical causes, until now, were not well understood. This dissertation is the first study of the political origins of the modern urban affordability crisis. It traces the roots of the issue to the national party realignment of the late twentieth century and, specifically, the ideological transformations that took place among liberals around the issue of urban growth. In the nineteen thirties and forties, liberal Democrats in cities across the country were emphatically supportive of growth. Beginning in the fifties, however, Americans dismayed by the unfulfilled promises of postwar society began to question the idea that prosperity demanded the continued expansion of the cities and suburbs in which they lived. I propose "antigrowth politics" as a new way of thinking about this constellation of loosely related citizen movements whose participants fought to guide, limit, or reverse the course of metropolitan development taking place in their backyards. Antigrowth activists proposed that a more equitable society could be realized not through a centralized government directing urban growth but rather through a patchwork nation of stable, self-governing polities each charged with charting its own future. By the late twentieth century, antigrowth activism had produced a novel political coalition that appealed to disillusioned New Dealers, lapsed leftists, and moderates dismayed by the rise of the New Right. This new generation of Democrats was much more skeptical of—and in many cases downright hostile toward—not only urban growth itself, but also the idea that such growth was in any way compatible with liberalism as they now defined it.

Placing debates about urban growth at the center of the process by which the fragile social order of the twentieth century gave way to the fractious politics of the twenty-first, "Cities of Amber" revises existing assumptions about the relationship between ideology, political economy, and the built environment. In so doing, it offers a new understanding of the thing that today we call liberalism, the influence of cities in its creation, and their role in making modern American society. Historians have long argued that the major problems of America in the twenty-first century—particularly in its largest cities—originate in the Democratic Party’s capitulation to conservatives on deregulation, privatization, and other forms of “neoliberalism.” The history of antigrowth politics, however, shows that liberals never abandoned their goal of effecting social progress through use of state power. Rather, in “blue” cities across the country, new constituencies of self-identified liberals picked up the pieces of the dismantled New Deal and rearranged them to serve different goals, on different ideological bases, at different levels of governance. Their success at reining in the excesses of the “growth machine” brought stability to cities for a fortunate few. Yet, their worldview’s own contradictions—unresolved and perhaps unresolvable—destabilized the lives of others, giving rise to the permanent housing shortages, exorbitant real estate values, unsustainable exurban commutes, and intensified segregation that plague cities today. Moving away from interpretations that depict America on a linear path from a statist past to a “late capitalist” present, "Cities of Amber" shows that our current cost-of-living crisis is the result not of the inexorable power of laissez-faire but rather of liberals’ deliberate attempts to redress the harms of the postwar urban order.