PROBLEMS IN POLICY ANALYSIS AND URBAN GOVERNMENT

Malcolm C. Getz, The Economics of the Urban Fire Department
Robert K. Yin, Changing Urban Bureaucracies
Pietro S. Nivola, The Urban Service Problem     

AMERICAN POLICY FOR HOUSING AND COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT: A COMPARATIVE EXAMINATION

The United States and the major northern European countries all have developed a variety of strategies for governmental intervention in housing and urban development. These include rent supplements, subsidized mortgages, incentives to homeownership, land clearance, and construction and management of housing by public authorities. Despite similarities in the types of programs offered, the countries vary markedly in levels of public expenditure, consistency of policy, and institutional structure of the housing market. Differences in housing policies and institutions produce different outcomes. Settlement patterns, housing costs, level of home-ownership, and availability of housing for different income groups can be traced to these varying contexts for housing investment. Explanation of national differences lies in the differing organization of economic interests through the respective political systems.     

U.S. URBAN POLICY: THE POSTWAR STATE AND CAPITALIST REGULATION

This paper provides an historically grounded theory of U.S. urban policy which is informed by regulationist theory and recent contributions to the theory of the State. It is shown how the content and form of urban policy in the New Deal, was shaped by the rise of mass-production Fordism and informed by the particular struggles that emerged in the United States during the formative period of the 1930s and 1940s. These struggles produced a particular State policy response, setting in place a limited and constrained mode of State intervention in the economy. In the realm of urban policy, this narrow form of State intervention set limits on further rounds of State policy, leaving the U.S. State unable to respond in an effective way to the mounting economic crises of the 1970s and the 1980s, contributing to the so-called "failure" of urban policy.