Saving America's Cities

"An incisive treatment of the entire urban-planning world in America in the last half of the 20th century" —Alan Ehrenhalt, The New York Times In twenty-first century America, some cities are flourishing and others are struggling, but they all must contend with deteriorating infrastructure, economic inequality, and unaffordable housing. Cities have limited tools 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, Lizabeth Cohen follows the career of Edward J. Logue. A Yale-trained lawyer, rival of Robert Moses, and sometime critic of Jane Jacobs, Logue saw renewing cities 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 New York State's Urban Development Corporation, which built entire new towns, including Roosevelt Island in New York City. Logue's era of urban renewal has a complicated legacy: Neighborhoods were demolished and residents dislocated, but there were also genuine successes and progressive goals. Saving America's Cities is a dramatic story of heartbreak and destruction but also of human idealism and resourcefulness, opening up possibilities for our own time. "Engrossing." — The Wall Street Journal "Cohen sketches Logue vividly, illuminating his forcefulness, his passion, his masculine confidence." — The Nation "A complex portrait." — The Boston Globe "An essential read." — Library Journal, starred review