In twenty-first-century America, some cities are flourishing while others are struggling. But all must contend with deteriorating infrastructure, economic inequality, and unaffordable housing. City governments have limited tools with which to address these problems, and many must rely on the private market to support the public good. It wasn't always this way. For almost three decades after World War II, even as national policies promoted suburban sprawl, the federal government underwrote renewal efforts for cities that had suffered during the Great Depression and the war and were now bleeding residents into the suburbs. In Saving America's Cities, the prizewinning historian Lizabeth Cohen follows the career of Edward J. Logue, whose shifting approach to the urban crisis tracked the changing balance between government-funded public programs and private interests that would culminate in the neoliberal rush to privatize solutions to entrenched social problems. A Yale-trained lawyer and sometime critic of both Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs, Logue saw urban renewal as an extension of the liberal New Deal. He worked to revive a declining New Haven, became the architect of the "New Boston" of the 1960s, and later led the New York State Urban Development Corporation, which built entire new towns, including Roosevelt Island in New York City. Logue's last major job took him to the South Bronx, where he engaged with neighborhood groups to pursue new strategies for revitalizing one of the poorest parts of the nation with the limited options available in Ronald Reagan's United States. Logue's era of urban renewal has a complicated legacy: whole neighborhoods were demolished and residents dislocated, but there were also genuine successes motivated by progressive goals. Saving America's Cities is a dramatic story of heartbreak and destruction but also of human idealism and resourcefulness. More than the history of the postwar American city, it opens up new possibilities for our own time. -- From dust jacket.

Introduction:Cities in crisis -- Part I: New Haven in the 1950s: creating a laboratory for urban renewal -- The making of an urban renewer -- Urban renewal as a liberal project -- Trouble right here in model city -- Part II: Boston in the 1960s: rebuilding the city on the hill -- Sizing up the old Boston -- Battling for a new Boston -- Negotiating neighborhoods -- Part III: New York in the 1970s and 1980s: winning and losing an empire in the Empire State -- Constructing a 'great society' in New York -- From fair share to belly up -- Ashes to gardens in the South Bronx.