The Growth as an Opportunity Machine
This review covers four urban scholarly works that explore questions of growth and its consequences. First, there is the seminal work of Logan and Molotch (1987) who’s article The City as a Growth Machine highlights the political economy of urban development with a neo-Marxist view. Secondly, Jackson’s Gentleman’s Agreement offers another critical view of growth (and exclusionary) processes, and he keenly notes the social and racial aspects of government policy that guide development (Jackson, 2000). He adds a critique of wealthy enclaves in contrast to urban poverty. Growth (or exclusion) has consequences, too, and the effects of unequal development are brought to light by Fullilove (2004) and her “root shock” theory of a traumatic stress to the “emotional ecosystem” impacted when neighborhoods are destroyed (or change). Finally, Chetty, et al., examine a policy — Moving to Opportunity — and provide empirical evidence that place (moving away from poverty towards better neighborhoods) positively influences long-run individual socioeconomic outcomes. Overall, we have a view that growth is driven by processes beyond simple “natural” market or organic systems, and when growth or exclusion occur there are important socioeconomic consequences to individuals that all urbanists are well-advised to consider.
Before offering my critiques, I offer some positionality. I am an accredited urban planner, and simultaneously work for an organization called Smart Growth America, and as a researcher for CBRE, Inc., a commercial real estate brokerage firm. Accordingly, my training and experience is centered around growth, and using my professional skills to try and guide growth towards more equitable ends commensurate with my liberal (often neoliberal) views.
This is precisely why I take my strongest issue with Logan and Molotch’s Growth Machine theory because it has not withstood the test of time to account for the fact that anti-growth (or “NIMBY”) forces, especially from the political right, are causing substantial economic and social damage to cities and regions. It is they, the NIMBYs, who keep Westchester County, New York exclusive; it is they of New Jersey’s infamous Mount Laurel decision; it is they who oppose affordable housing development in their community, or any apartments at all; it is they who oppose mass transit projects because trains may actually provide access to populations of need.
But Logan and Molotch have a blind spot here because the entire premise of the Growth Machine hypothesis is that the capitalist structure, and the quest for returns, places all sorts of forces in the city to become in-cahoots with the pro-development forces; everyone wittingly or unwittingly is in service of the rentiers, and these forces value “exchange value” of land over “use value.” Each actor desires or is complicit with the unquestioned growth of the city, and Logan and Molotch argue that “local growth…is a transfer of wealth and life chances from the general public to the rentier groups and associates” (Logan & Molotch, 1987). Growth is bad, it appears, and Logan and Molotch are the ur-NIMBYs even if they didn’t realize it.
Who is not to blame here as being part of the “growth coalition?” Of course developers, corporate capitalists, and obsequious politicians play center stage, but even the local media and newspapers are knaves to the growth coalition in wanting more growth and eyeballs — a position that seems silly today given that online media decimated local journalism even in large cities — but they don’t end their indictments there. Utilities, local universities, retailers, entertainment venues, sports teams, organized labor in the building trades, and on and on to the point that it is unclear whether Logan and Molotch would even spare the city’s dog population, too, for stray dogs may be knaves who desire more trash leftovers associated with growth.
Aside from a blanket indictment that only spares the most marginalized classes, the problem with Logan and Molotch is they contend that growth, per se, as some unnatural choice. I, a planner, take strong issue with this for what is planning as an entire profession if not planning for the inevitable changes of growth, normative views notwithstanding? As long as humans tend to procreate geometrically, there are only a few options: cities grow, they can densify, they can sprawl, or people settle or colonize new lands. Logan and Molotch, in describing a social process of development (at best they are unoriginally restating that cities have a political economy), are forced to do some gymnastics by forcing growth to be tied to a rentier-class agenda instead of something natural. Perhaps their theory’s best application is in explaining a proliferation of sports complexes and corporate relocation subsidies, but it does not settle with the mere desire of a city to to welcome and accommodate new residents.
Logan and Molotch clearly believe this type of growth to be negative in their neo-Marxist position, but a many of their claims are significantly challenged since the 1980s. “The reality is that local growth does not make jobs, it only distributes them,” is not a reality to the vast literature on agglomeration economics. They also claim that “growth has obvious negative consequences for the physical environment” (Logan & Molotch, 1987) and so belie the Joni Mitchell- style 1970s urban sprawl era in which they wrote; however, today movements like Smart Growth and New Urbanism posit precisely that increased city density and infill (read: city growth) is exactly an environmental ameliorative to the ills of urban sprawl. Nonetheless, even if I am unconvinced by Logan and Molotch’s neo-Marxist Growth Machine, I admit that it remains influential among an anti-growth NIMBY coalition, including the anti-growth populist left and an anti-growth right (Baby Boomer suburban homeowners) arguing from the left in bad faith.
By contrast, Jackson (2000) highlights patterns of unequal development but instead focuses on “the invisible fences that surround entire municipal jurisdictions in the United States.” If Logan and Molotch critique the insidious forces behind city growth, Jackson is focused on the exclusivity of certain places and their enabling government policies. Jackson advances the urbanism discourse by underscoring the importance of government policies in guiding unequal development in the U.S., especially with regard to income and race. A focus on Darien and New Canaan, Connecticut, Newark, and White Plains highlights the way that resources are jealously protected by communities and in fact, some places are kept anti-growth. Government policies play a key role, according to Jackson, and I offer that he provides a theory of unequal development more harmonious with a contemporary view of urbanism. Here there is no capitalist-rentier boogeyman conspiracy in which we are all knaves, but instead a more contemporary liberal view of an urban political economy.
Jackson points to a host of policies that perpetuate regional inequality to preserve the posh nature of exclusive communities. He points to exclusionary zoning restrictions, federal lending and tax policies, overt discrimination, and a rejection of low-income housing. These are anti-growth policies, unlike a Growth Machine view. Where was the growth coalition that would have sought continued and ruthless population expansion in New Canaan? Logan and Molotch might have a difficult time explaining why New Canaan rejects growth and preserves its wealth within its “invisible fences” that Jackson does so well to describe. In fact, it is the “pro-growth” city of Newark, with less restrictive zoning, that did see more poverty; but on the other hand that poverty can also be viewed as non-exclusion. If a poor black family could not conceivably live in New Canaan due to economic and racial discrimination, they could live in Newark without the same level of overt exclusion. Newark is a place where that family, at a minimum, could exist, unlike New Canaan.
There are consequences to unequal development, too, and those merit as much worthiness as a sociological object of study as the processes. Here, Fullilove (2004) offers a perspective that fits squarely into the contemporary debates over gentrification and displacement, or the negative effects of growing cities. Her “root shock” theory uses a physiological metaphor to both place, and individuals, who face a “shock” to the system through rapid change and displacement. To her “the experience of root shock — like the aftermath of a server burn…stay with the individual for a lifetime” (Fullilove, 2004). Like Jackson who highlights government policy in unequal development, Fullilove takes square aim at 20th century U.S. urban renewal programs and the massive change and displacement they caused (and a nostalgia for the Brooklyn Dodgers).
The consequences to individuals and communities, accordingly, are severe. A root shock “undermines trust; increases anxiety about letting loved ones out of one’s sight, destabilizes relationships, destroys social, emotional and financial resources, and increases the risk for every kind of stress-related disease” (Fullilove, 2004). This view is harmonious with economics and sociological literature on “cultural capital” and certainly causes a reader to be aware of the costs of displacement. While Fullilove discusses urban renewal, not the more “market-driven” processes of contemporary gentrification-based displacement, the effects would remain similar. Thus, even pro-growth, pro-density, pro-development and neoliberal urbanists who acknowledge that displacement occurs are at a minimum compelled to respect the emotional and social costs that occur. “Root shock,” to Fullilove, is a consequence of government policy and of the processes that cause unequal development and displacement of individuals, especially the marginalized. She does not indict growth, per se, but Fullilove does place a humanistic perspective on growth’s consequence that commands acknowledgement.
Can some policies help or ameliorate the patterns of unequal development? The Moving to Opportunity (MTO) program was one federal program that provided vouchers to poor families in high-poverty projects to move to lower-poverty neighborhoods. As an important empirical work on the topic of place-based poverty and mobility, Chetty, et al. (2016) suggest a sort of conversere to “root schock”: when moving from high-poverty to low-poverty neighborhoods, individuals who were young at the time experienced increase earnings, college attendance rates, and reduced single parenthood (Chetty et al., 2016). By exploiting a natural experiment because the vouchers were provided randomly, the authors bolster their statistical validity in the claim that environmental poverty impacts socioeconomic outcomes.
This might suggest that poor people should move away from poor areas if they could, or alternatively that more opportunity should be provided for them in wealthy areas. Here is the crux for anti-growth people like Logan and Molotch, however: if a poor family were to desire moving from Newark to New Canaan, how could they if New Canaan closes itself to growth, especially if local residents oppose any growth on the very Growth Machine rhetoric? How can working class people in the Rust Belt enjoy job opportunities in San Francisco if the latter will not build any new housing? The U.S. population has this finicky tendency to grow, and people have to exist in space. Yes, there are complex sociological processes that explain unequal development, but growth itself does tend to come. We can criticize those processes, but also improve on them instead of fighting growth. Today’s urbanists should be well-aware of consequences of displacement like “root shock” and the opportunities like the MTO voucher program, but keep in mind that one city’s growth is the opportunity for an individual somewhere else.
References
Chetty, R., Hendren, N., & Katz, L. F. (2016). The effects of exposure to better neighborhoods on children. The American Economic Review, 106(4), 855–902. doi:10.1257/aer.20150572
Fullilove, M. (2004). Root Shock : How Tearing Up City Neighborhoods Hurts America, and What We Can Do About It. New York: Ballantine Books.
Jackson, K. T. (2000). Gentleman’s Agreement: Discrimination in Metropolitan America. In B. Katz (Ed.), Reflections on Regionalism. Washington: Brookings Institution Press.
Logan, J., & Molotch, H. (1987). The City as a Growth Machine. Berkeley: University of California Press.
