What solutions to urban problems did the settlement house movement propose

1 Introduction

Neighborhood revitalization efforts and programs, both public and private, will be reviewed. These include early efforts at elimination of slums led by settlement houses, housing reformers, and social workers. This was followed by government programs like housing and health codes, public housing, urban renewal (both slum clearance and rehabilitation), model cities, neighborhood planning and redevelopment, and, most recently, the empowerment and enterprise zone program. Various techniques of neighborhood revitalization will be reviewed, as well as critiques of their impact. Likewise, community development programs, both public and private, and the role of community development corporations will be reviewed. The primary emphasis will be on the United States.

5 Early Surveys in the United States

Developments in the USA shared many features of this British experience. In both societies the social survey was shaped by the salience of voluntary effort, of liberal political traditions that restricted government initiatives, and of values promoting ‘responsible individualism.’ Thus we can speak of an Anglo-American tradition of social survey movements that shared many fundamental features. In both countries the settlement house movement provided a base for fostering social investigation. The influence of their ideas and the publicity they gave to the existence of social conditions created a more thoughtful climate for the reception of social surveys.

At the same time, the US context contained challenges not found in the British milieu. More isolated from political power, unable to draw on traditional criticisms of industrialization, and less likely to work closely with organized labor, reformers had to make the most of their middle-class resources. They also stood in a different relationship to emerging social science. By the end of the century, there was a different relationship between professional expertise and the developing skills of social investigation than in the UK, one which also had repercussions for conceptions of objectivity and of what constituted social science. In these circumstances, the social survey became even more important to middle-class reformers. For the objective data provided by the surveys were uniquely effective in mobilizing ‘public opinion’—that amorphous combination of middle-class and working-class attitudes that activated politicians and labor leaders alike within the US political environment. Surveys could get action (especially when linked with sensationalist press reports) even when ‘monster’ meetings and petitions could not.

The social survey in the USA in the period between 1880 and 1940, while resembling and differing from its British counterpart, directly imitated Booth's work in certain respects. Florence Kelley's work on the Hull-House Maps and Papers was one of the earliest US surveys and very much in the Booth tradition. Other studies followed. The role of the settlement house movement in publicizing social conditions was not confined to poverty. Indeed issues such as child labor, the treatment of juveniles in the court system, sweated labor and poor housing conditions loomed as large if not larger in their concerns. At the state level some notable innovations were effected, for example, the establishment of the Illinois Juvenile Court in 1899. W. E. B. DuBois' study of The Philadelphia Negro (1899) by a young black sociologist was notable for its thoroughness and detachment.

1 Market Failure and the Drive for New Social Knowledge

The devastating market failures of the late nineteenth century, destabilizing waves of bankruptcies, mass unemployment, and chronic, desperate poverty produced an enormous disappointment of traditional liberal expectations regarding the efficacy of the market. New liberals recognized market failure and attendant social conflicts as evidence of a wider collapse, more disruptive to intellectual, social, and political order and more menacing to communities of a social contract based on unfettered competition between white males that had been implemented during the market revolution of the Jacksonian era. Rejecting the excessive individualism, localism, and states-rights obstructionism of that period as morally and intellectually bankrupt, they put themselves quite deliberately in the business of conceptual innovation, seeking a higher rationality that would place knowledge in the service of a more democratically constituted society, which would maintain itself in part by allotting intellectuals a special role in shaping a more vigorous, capable, developed, and purposeful national government.

Across the range of nations involved, the conceptual revolution that new liberals sought to promote was grounded institutionally in an international social science association movement that fostered transatlantic borrowing, and in critical journalism, settlement houses, and social surveys, all of them cranked up to record, analyse, and disseminate empirical data, propound theory, encourage the development of political leadership responsive to the ‘teachings’ of liberal social knowledge, improve the execution of policy, and advocate reforms intended to renovate and enable Enlightenment ideals of political equality and social justice. Within government, in investigative agencies such as improved censuses, labor, women's, and children's bureaus, trade boards, and bureaus of corporations, high-level civil servants such as Llewllyn Smith and Lord Beveridge in England, and Carroll Wright, Francis Amasa Walker, and Julia Lathrop, in the United States provided conduits for policy ideas from those burgeoning ‘parastates’ into the state. Within this ‘great transformation’ in social thought and political practice, crucial early players were the academic social science disciplines, whose missions and boundaries were historically determined, differing from country to country. Academic professionalization proceeded rapidly in the American research universities, fueled by rapid economic growth, academic entrepreneurship, and the relative shortage of other types of creditable specialized intelligence.

But from the beginning, progressive academic economists, political scientists, and sociologists were interested in more than the provision of expertise; even as conservative university trustees (and at times conservative colleagues) disciplined their advocacy, social scientists saw themselves as crucial links in the interpretive processes needed to make the new political and social economy intelligible. Thus their specialized investigations and discourses were a critical factor in reworking the political agenda so that it placed prominently before policy makers and emerging, activist publics as problems urgently needing comprehension the range of issues that came to define the politics and policymaking of the new liberal era. Most prominent among these issues were business cycles and unemployment, rights and conditions of labor, wages and distribution, industrial organization and corporate reorganization, family welfare and gender roles, problems of the low-paid, exploited immigrant work force and—often with disabling assumptions rolled in—issues of race. They also addressed related issues of governance: the detection of wholesale corruption of law and government that inspired the clean government crusade, and the need for methods of building up the cognitive abilities and administrative capacities of public officials.

Strategic rhetorical steps were taken early that shaped the ties between American governance and intellectual life in the period. In the United States, Woodrow Wilson's early and generative ‘Science of Administration’ (1887) addressed republican fears of bureaucracy by placing a firewall between politics and administration. Reflecting distaste for the intense, tribal partisanship of Gilded Age politics, academics and bureaucrats (unlike many female social scientists and social reformers) adopted nonpartisanship as a standard description of their professional ethic. This pristine canon elevated everyday standards of disciplinary and agency practice, but it often hampered the effectiveness of social scientists as advocates for change, routing their activism through ostensibly apolitical venues such as foundations and think-tanks, which ceded partial control of research agendas to corporate elites.

4 Government Community Economic Development Program

Government programs in community economic development go back to at least the early industrial era. Tenement and poverty area clearance and clean up schemes have been part of national, state, and local level to transform low income areas. The most well recognized community or neighborhood level programs were launched with Jane Adams at Hull House in Chicago at the turn of the twentieth century. The aim of Hull House, later called the Settlement House Programs, was to provide professional interventions in a community in a way that assisted the community leaders in helping themselves. As this idea was refined new programs emerged to accomplish many of the same goals. In England, Local Housing Councils took on similar roles with the low income workers.

Similarly, throughout Europe and particularly in Scandinavia programs were designed in the 1930s to eradicate the worst slum conditions. All of these programs have very similar components. Usually they provide some basic services for the low income such as housing or home repairs. Additional services are organized by group or community workers to assist the residents form self help devices. These devices range from buying, farming, or business cooperatives to help poor communities meet basic needs for local control and ownership. Today cooperatives have grown into major institutions from this community economic development base. In the United States and throughout Europe, cooperatives operate banks, insurance companies, health services, and even telephone and electric power companies.

Another aspect of government programming has been the designation of special distressed neighborhood or community economic zones. The earliest of these in the United States were community action councils in designated poor neighborhoods in the 1960s. These community action councils were part of the War on Poverty. The concept was that targeting these areas for special government assistance would stimulate business relocations to them and thus increase local employment and capital formation. The most recent incarnation of these zones is called, e.g., enterprise or empowerment. The theory is that altering the tax breaks and employment incentives the area will become attractive for business relocations and expansions. Similar programs have been proposed and adopted in the United Kingdom, Australia, and several Asian countries including China with varying impacts. Green (1991) and several other scholars have questioned the validity of this approach. His work shows that special tax measures are seldom a reason for a firm to change location. In reality there are many factors, chief among them is the quality of nearby human resources (Blakely 1994).

Small and minority and low income business formation has been an important component of virtually all community economic development initiatives. More recently, government program efforts in this area have borrowed from the Bangladesh and the Basque Region of Spain experiences of group lending strategies called microlending. This approach blends both social capital and business formation into a single approach. The micro-loans programs provide small seed capital to a group of borrowers who may enter in different enterprises or may even use their small loan (US $100–US $5000) capital to buy clothes for work. The requirement is pledge and guarantee repayment as a group. The group component creates the social capital that is so frequently missing in other efforts. The group members learn to trust and rely on one another for other networks and to use one another's expertise as needed via bartering arrangements. This approach has had very good results in most of the places that it has been introduced. Another variant of this is the host of government programs that aim at community banking and other capital retention programs. Community Development Banks have been formed with the specific intent and mandate to help create new businesses in low income areas. These banks have government direct support through special underwriting or loans and some funding from traditional banks as part of a government requirement for licensing.

The efforts described above do not represent all government efforts in the field of community economic development. In some cases, government programs have community economic development as a secondary or lower consideration. Further, new government programs are spawned to meet new circumstances such as welfare reform. The range or type of programs described above represents a classical typology rather than an exhaustive list. This type of program is seen in most of the industrialized world in one or more of these forms.

2.3 Urban Policy as Social Policy

Since the 1960s, urban policy in the United States has not been associated in the media and public debate primarily with the issues discussed so far, though the recent resurgence of concern about urban sprawl has shifted attention back to the effects of urban growth. Rather, for several decades, urban policy has been identified primarily with problems of poverty, racial discrimination, segregation, and the decline of central cities. As is true in so many other instances, such a definition of urban policy is not new. It emerged in tandem with the industrial city in the nineteenth century, when low wages, intense overcrowding, dilapidated housing, crime, social disorganization, and disease combined to generate a new form of urban slum. The public health effects of industrial urbanism first engendered policy responses that were engineering solutions, especially in the form of potable water supplies and waste disposal. Epidemics and infectious diseases, such as tuberculosis, also required medical responses, which took the form of public hospitals and health services. Crime problems engendered police forces and prisons.

However, by the late nineteenth century, the fact that so many of the new urban populations in the United States and Canada were immigrants, led to concerns for public safety in a larger sense, namely the stability of the society itself. Public education became a key element of local urban policy, its intent being both to provide a literate and capable labor force for the expanding economy, and to ensure that children were able to speak English and become acculturated into society at large. Fears that immigrants would bring with them European socialist ideas and form labor parties were not unjustified, for all that they were not realized. The momentum for these policies was certainly national in scope and linked to the prevailing sense of the United States as an emergent imperial power on a world scale. However, their realization was almost entirely at the state and local levels, where governments and influential voluntary groups were at times almost indistinguishable.

Poverty presented not only a risk to the health and social position of the affluent in American cities; it also affronted their belief in the United States as a place of freedom and opportunity. Efforts to help the ‘worthy poor’ raise themselves out of poverty took many forms, of which the Settlement House movement is the best known, evolving into forms of assistance associated with the social work profession. This movement also provided an early means for women of higher social status to become active in professional and social realms. Thus, by the early twentieth century, many believed that urban poverty called for effective governmental and voluntary actions.

A key realm of response was housing, and it is here that the largest challenge to the idea of urban development through the market emerged. The slum was perceived in many ways, but the vision of grossly overcrowded, unhealthy, dilapidated housing was intrinsic to all of them. Observers and critics of capitalism had noted the inability of markets to provide adequate urban housing from early in the Industrial Revolution. Public efforts to regulate construction or management were largely ineffectual, however. By the end of the nineteenth century in the USA, as in Britain and Europe, there had emerged two competing policy responses. Public regulation of housing quality took the form of building and housing codes, enforced by local bureaucracies. Those who saw regulation as insufficient or ineffective called for direct public or non-profit ownership and rental of housing for low-income families. Market advocates opposed both.

The twentieth century saw the parallel evolution of these approaches to low-income housing policy in all three countries of North America. Mexico, which was undergoing a revolution and installation of a one-party state, probably exemplifies the highest level of commitment to public provision. However, the lack of resources due to underdevelopment, and the mistaken effort to adhere to unrealistic standards, ultimately ensured that public housing would become only a very limited part of its mass urbanization. In common with other developing countries, urbanization for the poor primarily meant informal housing on the margins of major cities. Canada, with a stronger tradition of government intervention, though varying greatly across the provinces, has also adhered to policies that give greater weight to provision of low-income housing. In both the United States and Canada, the tradition of local regulation continues, with rising standards and incorporation of new areas of oversight. In the United States, a determined effort to create a public housing program in the 1930s saw its culmination in the Housing Act of 1949, which led to construction of federally funded rental housing for the poor in most cities. However, the program became discredited, in part because of social problems emanating from its increasing racial segregation and focus on the very poorest populations, and in part because of insufficient funding to maintain and control high-rise housing that was ill-designed for its purpose. In a major shift of federal policy affecting cities, the program was largely replaced after 1974 by a low-income rental subsidy, which remains the basis of federal policy in this area. As a result, direct provision of new housing for the poor has switched towards the nonprofit sector.

Entangled with housing and poverty policy, especially in the United States, is the issue of race. American cities have long been segregated, both by race and income. African-Americans were confined by economics and social pressure to limited residential areas within cities. This phenomenon was exacerbated by major migration from the rural South to northern cities throughout the first half of the twentieth century. While that migration resulted at first in opportunity and rising incomes, by the 1950s there had also emerged ghettoes of African-American and other minority groups in poverty, in which serious social problems persisted. This process was exacerbated by the out-migration from older cities of white middle- and working-class populations seeking a suburban lifestyle and impelled also by race-based fear and prejudice. As a result, cities' financial capacity to address the needs of their populations declined. Education and public service quality diminished, which reinforced the migration. With improvements in civil rights during the 1960s, yet with racial discrimination still widespread, the contrasts between racial groups' aspirations and achievement burst out into urban civil disorder on a massive scale. Large areas of cities including Detroit, Los Angeles, and Washington DC were devastated.

The question of appropriately responsive policy is almost paradigmatic of urban policy in general. On the one hand, efforts were made to improve incomes and opportunity through broad programs, such as those for education and job training. On the other, were efforts to empower local communities through a variety of supports and incentives for the formation of community organizations. The so-called ‘War on Poverty’ of the 1970s exemplified both kinds of policy. It certainly led to the formation of new political networks and organizations among the urban poor, with long-term results on the racial and ethnic makeup of local politics. However, the position of the poorest and most socially disadvantaged populations improved little, if at all, in the face of a widening gap in the income distribution at large and a decline in the demand for unskilled labor. Increasing crime and social disorganization associated with rising drug use also contributed to the problem. In the face of falling national rates of economic growth, budget stringency led to the withering away of urban poverty programs. In the mid-1990s, these issues were once more addressed by national policy, operating this time through the medium of the welfare program, and especially its support for unmarried parents. Insistence on entry into the labor market has reduced the level of dependency substantially, but the results have yet to be tested outside a boom economy.