Federalism and the origins of the urban crisis: The geo-politics of housing and highways, 1916--1956

This dissertation is an inquiry into the origins of two federal programs directly implicated in the sharp decline of U.S. cities after World War II: urban renewal and the Interstate Highway Program. It follows a hunch that the sub-national states played a decisive role in the origins and outcome of these programs. The investigation takes the sovereignty of the sub-national states seriously and develops a conceptual framework that helps to untangle the institutional layers of the federal system that often obscured the states' role from view. Specifically, it traces the origins of urban renewal to a displacement of the class struggles of the late 19th century industrializing cities into a partisan struggle for control of public works spending. This partisan struggle, which pit the urban machines against rival party machines at the state level of government, was transformed by the New Deal into rival partisan claims on the federal purse and subsequently into rival Keynesian plans for post-war prosperity. The federal Housing Acts of 1949 and 1954 represent the culmination of the urban machine side of this partisan struggle. The Interstate Highway Program, by contrast, emerged from a dialectic of inter-state struggle in the federal system. This geo-political struggle, which pit states from the industrial Northeast against states in the South and West over a period of forty years, was resolved, first, through a program of federal grants that redistributed resources in the federal system from the Northeast to the South and West, and then, through the bond market, which shifted the funding advantage to the Northeast by financing the construction of toll roads and bridges in urbanized areas. The failure of Congress to increase federal highway aid after World War II considerably raised the stakes of this inter-state struggle by setting off a wave of toll road construction in the Northeast that compelled non-urbanized states of the South and West to take on increasing levels of debt. The Interstate Highway Act of 1956 was the greatly inflated cost of restoring the peace.