North American industrial centers, but it was Flaherty’s austerity policies and neighborhood planning initiatives that piqued the interest of U.S. officials in the late 1970s. Flaherty had been the first northern mayor to endorse Jimmy Carter in 1976, and he resigned his mayoral post to become a deputy attorney general in the Carter administration, a reward for his early and vigorous support. Flaherty’s fiscal populism in his years as mayor presaged Carter’s approach to solving the problems facing U.S. cities and pointed the way toward the centrist New Democrat platform that solidified in the 1980s. Faced with fiscal crises in the early 1970s, Flaherty and mayors like him across the political spectrum saw neighborhood groups’ demands for community control as an opportunity to shift some of the planning and service-provision functions of cash-strapped local governments to individuals and nonprofits. Carter drew heavily on these local experiments to develop and legitimate policies that privileged voluntarism and self-help over government programs and federal spending, and in the process laid the institutional foundation for Reagan’s neoliberal retrenchment.
With urban constituencies irate over nearly a decade of neglect from Washington, the formulation of a federal policy to aid socially and fiscally distressed cities had featured prominently in Carter’s campaign promises to mayors and civil rights groups. In March 1977, Carter convened a cabinet-level working group to review federal urban and regional development programs, consult with state and local government officials, and recommend administrative and legislative reforms.31 Carter also appointed a National Commission on Neighborhoods (NCN) in 1977 and sponsored a White House Conference on Balanced Growth and Economic Development (WH Conference) in 1978 to make recommendations about urban and economic development policy. Participants in both initiatives—individuals and groups from across the political spectrum and with a diversity of economic interests—pointed toward increased decentralization, privatization, and voluntarism as federal policy responses to urban decline.32
In 1978, Carter presented what he described as the nation’s first comprehensive urban policy to Congress in a report titled A New Partnership to Conserve America’s Communities.33 Carter’s much-anticipated national urban policy did not introduce major new federal programs or substantially increase funding levels for existing urban programs.34 He and his advisors had used the NCN and WH Conference recommendations as political cover to support local-level voluntarism over increased federal funding. The most tangible result of the national urban policy, four executive orders issued in 1978, directed federal agencies to locate facilities in urban areas, emphasize procurement set-asides in areas with high unemployment, consider the impact of programs on urban areas, and establish an interagency council to implement the urban policy.35 The legislative package attached to A New Partnership failed to gain traction because liberal Democrats were unhappy about limits to federal oversight, because of bipartisan political opposition to targeting aid to distressed cities, and because of concern over the financial implications of the proposed programs in a time of stagflation and tax revolts.36 Most important, with his focus more fully on foreign policy and the economy, Carter did not push Congress to support the proposed legislation.37
Carter’s distrust of “special interests” and concern for the “forgotten” white middle class led him to step back from expansive federal programs, to oppose increased federal urban spending, and to promote the capacity of the private sector (including both for-profit and nonprofit entities), rather than the government, to address urban problems.38 Like Nixon, Carter attacked redundant programs and excessive paperwork and passed along as much oversight as possible for urban development to state and local governments. He rejected large-scale job creation programs and housing subsidies in favor of comparatively inexpensive programs such as the National Endowment for the Arts $35 million “Livable Cities” program for local public art and mural projects. In 1977, he introduced Urban Development Action Grants to stimulate private-sector urban redevelopment, and he instituted a countercyclical assistance program as part of an economic stimulus package to provide federal aid to states and localities particularly hard hit by the recession. The Carter administration also shifted a greater share of Community Development Block Grant funds to northeastern and midwestern cities. In general, however, Carter’s urban policy was an amplification of Nixon’s New Federalism.39
For reasons of political expediency—Carter knew he would need to attract both the suburban and southern vote in 1980—the president wanted to emphasize programs that provided “incentives,” “leverage,” and “catalysts” for private sector activity, which were less of a political liability than increased direct federal expenditures in cities. When it was released, Carter’s urban policy unequivocally signaled to big city mayors that the federal government would not provide large federal outlays to reverse urban decline or temper the effects of industrial restructuring. Cities were “more than just simply centers of jobs, communications and commerce,” A New Partnership reminded its readers. They were also “centers of learning, centers of culture, centers of social services.”40 It was this latter—postindustrial—assemblage of services that the Carter administration wanted to emphasize.
For Pittsburgh’s new mayor, Richard Caliguiri, the postindustrialism the Carter administration tacitly promoted was already a familiar paradigm. City council president Caliguiri became acting mayor when Flaherty left for Washington. Flaherty’s successor surely would have preferred a national urban policy that included increased federal funding, but his own view of the future of industrial cities hewed closely to that expressed in A New Partnership. The son of a milkman from Pittsburgh’s working-class, largely Italian Greenfield neighborhood, Caliguiri had followed Flaherty’s example and run for City Council as an independent in 1971, beating out the Democratic Party-endorsed candidate. When he ran for mayor in 1977 at the end of Flaherty’s term, the Democratic Party refused to support him. He again ran as an independent, backed by a group called “Pittsburghers for Caliguiri” that a suburban newspaper described as “a collection people, Democrats, independents, Republicans, volunteers, city payrollers and others not yet identified.”41 Even with broad support from his constituents, Caliguiri narrowly beat the Democratic candidate, popular Allegheny County commissioner Tom Foerster. When he ran for re-election in 1981 and 1985, he did so on the Democratic Party ticket and won by large margins.
Caliguiri may have taken a page out of his predecessor’s playbook when he spurned the local Democratic machine, but his mayoral ambitions for a second Renaissance made him more like David Lawrence than like Flaherty. Where Flaherty sought at the outset of his first term to loosen the bonds between the city government and corporate leaders, Caliguiri set out instead to restore the city’s public-private partnership. His desire to do so was seemingly a pragmatic response to national policies that increasingly privileged partnerships for urban and economic development. Renaissance II’s success hinged on introducing a wide array of public incentives for private development to induce corporate leaders to undertake large-scale construction projects for downtown office buildings. Caliguiri established the Mayor’s Development Council, a more business-friendly version of Flaherty’s mayoral advisory committee, to plan Renaissance II; he instructed his department heads to cooperate with developers; and he merged the city’s Departments of Housing and Economic Development with the URA to centralize redevelopment activities. One of the new mayor’s first official acts was to call a meeting with the Allegheny Conference and ask for help fixing the roads Flaherty had allowed to fall into disrepair. Gulf Oil CEO Jerry McAffee offered to bring in a macadam expert from California and loan him to the city for six months. The following summer, Caliguiri repaved “something like 120 miles of street.” That gesture symbolically renewed the close relationship between the Allegheny Conference and the city government, and the Allegheny Conference resumed a leading role in planning urban development.42
As soon as he restored the relationship between the city and the Allegheny Conference, Caliguiri launched his second Renaissance “to recover lost ground and to determine a new direction” for the city.43 He and his Planning Department routinely tried to downplay the devastating effects of industrial restructuring on the urban economy and focused instead on cultural development, high technology, and service sector job creation.44
