The Fate of Cities: Urban America and the Federal Government, 1945-2000

Abstract

The “urban crisis” declared in the United States in the mid-1960s helped generate a mountain of commentary. Until the appearance of this volume, however, there has been no systematic description of the range of federal responses to urban problems in the second half of the twentieth century. Extending Mark I. Gelfand's landmark study, A Nation of Cities: The Federal Government and Urban America, 1933–1965 (1975), Roger Biles provides an assessment in The Fate of Cities that is thorough and judicious. Biles divides his study according to presidential terms. Not surprisingly, Lyndon B. Johnson's expansive if flawed Great Society marks a high point of federal commitment, while Ronald Reagan's determination to shrink federal powers represents the nadir. Expenditures for essential services such as subsidized housing and mass transit tell part of the story. Competing philosophies of governance provide another element, and in this regard The Fate of Cities reflects the clash between parties that goes beyond urban policy to anticipate contemporary politics.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 22 citations exist upstream.