Saving America’s Cities: Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age, by Professor Lizabeth Cohen, Harvard Kennedy School of Politics.
(This author’s note: This is a long summary. I of course found all of it fascinating but you may not. The Boston section is pretty interesting for people who live in Boston, some of whom may remember the Logue era. New Yawkas may want to look at the last two sections on the Urban Development Corporation and the South Bronx Development Organization.)
Ed Logue was a force on urban redevelopment from the 1950s to the 1980s, with a 7-year stint at the Boston Redevelopment Authority between 1960 and 1967.
This book was challenging, not a bad thing. It is densely packed with all you ever wanted to know about urban development, municipal politics, emerging Black Power, and changing federal priorities over time concerning our cities. There’s also a great section on Logue’s time in Boston during a fascinating period in the city’s history.
Logue was a Philadelphia native. He and his three brothers went to Yale. He went to Yale Law School after a tour as a bombardier in WW2. He quickly lost interest in the law and went on to hold four major jobs during the golden age of urban renewal, from the mid-1950s to 1980 or so.
New Haven 1954 to 1960 New Haven was a typical American city in the 1950s, which is to say a mess, as manufacturing jobs left as did residents attracted to the shiny new suburbs. Logue came in to work with a charismatic new mayor, Richard Lee, who wanted to make New Haven the model for comeback cities. Logue had done work for Connecticut Governor Chester Bowles and also worked in major urban development activities in India. Logue attracted the best and the brightest from top schools. They crafted a master plan which focused on commercial revitalization as well as upgrading housing.
New Haven was in rough shape and Yale University was part of the problem. One-third of property was tax-exempt – mostly Yale-owned – and the university developed 26 new buildings between 1951 and 1963. That reduced tax revenue and displaced businesses and residents.
Logue brought in lots of federal money; $745 per resident during his tenure, by far the most of any US city. His noble goals included integrating neighborhoods, revitalizing commerce, building great schools, and creating a “slumless city.”
Logue’s people wanted to represent all interests, yet they felt the best way to do this was to assemble experts who knew what the people wanted and needed. He called this “pluralistic democracy” but many residents called it being ignored. Later, Logue would learn all about “participatory democracy,” a 1960s thing that would become key to his later work. Logue tended to bulldoze first and ask questions later, which could be a tad off-putting to the displaced. He did build a downtown mall to compete with suburban malls. That worked for a few years until the two anchor stores figured out that most people preferred shopping at suburban malls, at which point they left the city.
Logue’s legacy in New Haven is mixed. He did build nice commercial areas and did bring good housing to some troubled areas. However, he was part of the team that displaced 20% of the population during Mayor Lee’s tenure.
Logue was basically asked to leave New Haven after some problems with residents who accused him of promoting the “Africanization of public housing” and with financial issues relating to paying for construction. He wasn’t a numbers guy.
Boston1960 to 1967 John Collins took office as mayor in 1960 and was the head of a failing city, similar to New Haven, with a declining middle-class population and an old, tired urban façade that had been built during very different times. He convinced Logue to be his Boston Redevelopment Authority director by paying him a lot of money and reorganizing the BRA to give Logue previously unheard-of power. Boston had a funding problem in that 42% of the property was tax-exempt.
Logue made friends with the right people, including the powerful Cardinal Cushing, and he joined all of the right downtown clubs so he could meet the power brokers. Logue’s view of development as a tool for social justice reform was consistent with the Cardinal’s belief that an urban renaissance would lift all boats and, perhaps more importantly, keep Catholics in the city and in their parish pews.
His first job was to fix Scollay Square, today’s Government Center. He did that by flattening a lot of roads and building City Hall, which reflected brutalist architecture. He also built the rather pedestrian JFK federal building. Logue then turned his attention to rebuilding the city’s poorer neighborhoods.
He started with Washington Park, a neighborhood that had a fair number of Black homeowners. Logue identified local leaders, including Boston legends Muriel and Otto Snowden, as his negotiating team. He ended renovating the neighborhood but managed to push out a lot of minority homeowners. He did build a new school, shopping areas, a YMCA, parks and some affordable housing, but a lot of work was left undone by the time he left Boston.
Logue then went to work on the Madison Park neighborhood in the South End, one of Boston’s most diverse areas, with 41% non-white, a big number back then. Logue reached out to United South End Settlements (USES) – the main local non-profit organization – as his negotiating partner. Boston activist (and later state rep and mayoral candidate) Mel King did not like that. He saw USES as too establishment. He organized huge protests in Tent City, which indeed was a tent, and Logue sat down with community people to redesign the plans, which ended up building affordable housing where Tent City stood. Ed Logue had finally figured out what participatory democracy was all about. Villa Victoria, a major housing project in the South End, was built with lots of grassroots input. Development plans also included Madison Park High School, which Logue conceptualized as being the next best thing in public education that would attract middle class white students as well as neighborhood kids. That didn’t work. Madison Park continues to be an educational challenge.
Ed renovated parts of Charlestown, a different community that was white and Irish and good at organizing. Logue faced 2,700 Townies at an early public meeting and, being no dummy, figured out that he really had to work with these people, which he did
Logue was changing his development model to one that actually included listening to the people at the grass roots who would actually be affected by what he was doing. That was an evolution from his earlier approach which reflected a classic Progressive Era/Woodrow Wilson attitude, “We’re wicked smaht and we know better than you do what you need.”
Ed was wearing out his welcome, as was his wont, so he decided to run for mayor in 1967 after leaving the BRA. He came in fourth out of 12. Louis Day Hicks topped the preliminary election ballot, with eventual winner Kevin White second. Apparently, Logue was a terrible campaigner. It didn’t help his candidacy that at public forums sometimes a voter would yell out that Logue had evicted his grandmother.
Ed Logue left a lot undone in Boston but he did tap into federal redevelopment funding so that Boston moved way up to become the 4th most generously funded city, and new housing and schools were built. Perhaps most important was the fact that his initial top-down approach galvanized a strong community push-back which led to real participatory democracy in later years.
New York State and Governor Rockefeller 1968 to 1975 Nelson Rockefeller was governor of New York and he had presidential ambitions. He reached out to Logue to lead a new state agency, the Urban Development Corporation (UDC), which would undertake development projects all over the state. Logue liked the idea of having a statewide mandate and he took the job and assembled his team, many of whom had been with him for some time.
The effort used a unique approach to raise money, which it had to do because President Nixon pretty much eliminated federal redevelopment funding. Rocky (the governor, not the Wonder Cat) came up with the idea of “moral obligation bonds” which would be held by private investors but did not have the usual “full faith and credit” backing of the state government. It was sort of the honor system and it basically worked to raise a lot of money.
New Haven and Boston had taught Logue to stop leveling neighborhoods as Step 1 in development. He looked for undeveloped land and found a lot of it in New York City and in other communities. His crowning achievement was Roosevelt Island, where he built a mixed-income, mixed-use municipality on what had been an abandoned island in the East River. He built homes, schools, swimming clubs, and commercial space, and it basically worked. Due to his time with Boston Mayor Collins, who was in a wheelchair, he reached out to disabled people and made the facilities accessible years before the Americans with Disabilities Act.
He wasn’t as successful in other endeavors. Black Power and other community activists were ascendant during this period, and getting things done was tough. He tried to bring a mixed-race development to upscale Westchester County north of the city. That went nowhere as the 1,000 people attending a planning meeting were uniformly against “urbanizing” their communities.
After Rockefeller left the governor’s office, things went south for Logue. He had never been very good at accounting, and an investigation was started to see if he had stolen or misappropriated money. It turns out that he hadn’t; he was just really clueless about keeping track of spending. Nonetheless, he was out of a job again.
Logue did set up a lot of future New York State development, with 100,000 people eventually housed in projects he had created.
The South Bronx 1978 to 1985 This area probably posed the biggest challenge for urban renewal than any part of the United States. Logue was hired to run the South Bronx Development Organization (SBDO), a fairly small operation compared to where he had worked previously. There were many absentee slumlords, and firemen responded to 12,000 arsons a year which provided insurance payouts to the property owners. Over one-third of the residents were on welfare. Many people were desperate for anyone to come in and begin to turn things around. Logue had a reputation for getting things done, at least until he didn’t.
Logue did not have many ready sources of outside funding to tap, so he had to identify lots of small pots of money for redevelopment. By now, Logue was totally into working with grassroots community people, including priests, nuns and ministers who were close to the people and pretty savvy politically. He didn’t try to construct dense housing; his first venture was to build a few single-family homes on property that had been seized for non-payment of taxes. He got lots of subsidies from public and private sources and made the homes affordable and built a lot of them. Many were sold to public sector workers, and virtually all of the new homeowners were minorities.
He ended up building single homes as well as more traditional public housing. His job ended in 1985 when President Reagan eliminated the federal funding that supported the SBDO. Still there was much left to do, and Logue’s work in the tough South Bronx led Mayor Ed Koch to commit to creating 250,000 units of affordable housing over 15 years. The Ford Foundation, long a source of private sector support for Logue, set up the Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC) which spawned significant redevelopment in many cities, including several in New York State.
Bob’s Take
This was a really good book. Reading it is like going to a seminar or urban redevelopment. Logue was brash and controversial and smart and irritating at times. He accomplished a lot yet never came close to using redevelopment as a fulcrum upon which to pivot social and economic justice. He fought to have the federal government be a steady source of development funding and to have bedroom suburban communities build housing in their towns for city residents. Neither one of those goals was realized.
He moved back to Boston after he retired and taught at MIT. He spent much of his time on Martha’s Vineyard where he did a lot of environmental work. He died in 2000 at age 78.
Ed Logue did show leaders that there were ways to solve seemingly intractable problems in improving our cities, and his work set the foundation for developing hundreds of thousands of new housing units in major cities. That is his legacy. Not a bad one.
