Robert B. Fairbanks

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Robert B. Fairbanks | The Failure of Urban Renewal in the Southwest: From City Needs to Individual Rights | The Western Historical Quarterly, 37.3 | The History Cooperative

The Failure of Urban Renewal in the Southwest: From City Needs to Individual Rights

Despite an initial interest in the slum clearance title of the Housing Act of 1949, three of the Southwest's largest metropolises, Dallas, Phoenix, and Albuquerque, passed on these programs not only due to the tardiness of state enabling legislation but because of a changing political discourse that emphasized the rights of the individual over the needs of the larger community.

BETWEEN 1949 AND 1964 the federal government approved funding for 970 urban renewal projects covering 36,400 acres, but not one for slum clearance in Dallas, Phoenix, or Albuquerque, three of the leading metropolises in the Southwest.¹ Although much of the literature on federal urban renewal has either focused on its failure to resurrect the city or has documented its horrendous impact on the city's neediest, this paper seeks to explore another issue.² It tries to understand why three rapidly growing southwestern cities that experienced not only slum housing but the blighting of downtown caused by rapid decentralization rejected the slum clearance portions of the urban redevelopment and urban renewal programs of the 1950s and 1960s.

This article explores the efforts of civic leaders to secure federal slum clearance in these three important cities and argues that the failure to embrace urban renewal did not simply stem from conservative leadership, but from a significant shift in political culture. Zane L. Miller has argued that in the 1950s there emerged a new mode of thinking that abandoned a preoccupation with the welfare of the whole city and replaced it with a new emphasis on the autonomy of individuals.³ In policy terms, this often meant that the rights of individuals gained increasing attention over the needs of the larger city. Because the urban Southwest was less encumbered by institutional and interest group discourse emphasizing city needs rather than individual rights, it demonstrated earlier than other parts of the nation the consequences of the new discourse about individual rights. Moreover, the urban Southwest's rapid growth created a certain dissonance with the old ways of thinking about cities and civic responsibility, and that dissonance would become part of a mindset that elected Ronald Reagan in 1980.⁴

Selection of three cities from different sections of the larger Southwest, as well as from separate states, makes it possible not only to query about unique regional characteristics, but to examine possible differences within this Southwestern Sunbelt. Each of these cities today contains the largest metropolitan population for its respective state. Dallas, located in the old Southwest region, had already experienced significant growth by the 1950s. Albuquerque and Phoenix, part of the new Southwest, were much smaller than Dallas before World War II. By 1950, Dallas's population stood at 434,462 compared to 106,818 for Phoenix and 96,815 for Albuquerque. Dallas also had a much larger black population than either Phoenix or Albuquerque although those two cities had a significant Latino population. All three cities grew at a rapid rate, but Dallas's growth of 47.4 percent between 1940 and 1950 paled to Phoenix's population increase of 63.3 percent and Albuquerque's meteoric growth rate of 173.1 percent.⁵ All three cities benefited tremendously from wartime mobilization. Dallas secured a huge airplane factory plant and an air base and became headquarters for the army's Eighth Service Command during the war. Phoenix emerged as a major military center at this time, and by 1942, housed three army camps, six air bases, and numerous defense plants. Albuquerque too benefited tremendously from the war with the establishment of Kirkland Air Force Base as well as the Sandia and Manzaino Bases. By the mid-1950s, all three cities also had business-led reform governments, dominated by non-partisan slates of candidates and run by city managers.⁶

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