by G. William Domhoff
April 2005
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Power structures at the city level are different from the national power structure. They are not junior editions of the national corporate community.
That's because local power structures are land-based growth coalitions. They seek to intensify land use. They are opposed by the neighborhoods they invade or pollute, and by environmentalists.
To the shock and dismay of land-based elites, the workers who poured into the cities between 1870 and 1920 challenged elite rule through Democratic Party machines and the Socialist Party. So the growth elites created a "good government" ideology and a set of "reforms" that literally changed the nature of local governments and took them out of the reach of the upstarts.
The theory presented here explains all the key case studies of the past, including the most important ones, such as Atlanta and San Francisco, and the one that had the most impact, political scientist Robert A. Dahl's study of New Haven, which turns out to be wrong on almost every key point.
The city-level pluralists (who have now morphed into public-choice theorists in some cases) have an inadequate theory of city power because they rely on classical free-market economics, ignore the fact that growth does not benefit everyone in the city, and downplay or ignore the genuine conflicts that exist between growth elites and neighborhoods. There is little or no concern with power in their theory.
Marxist theory fails at the local level because it does not take its own distinction between "exchange value" and "use value" seriously, focuses almost entirely on finance and industrial capital, treats neighborhood as a residual category (merely a place to reproduce the working class), and interprets every conflict as a "class conflict" even though the primary battle in cities is between land-based growth coalitions trying to increase "rents" and neighborhoods that are trying to defend their use values.
The Political Economy of Urban Power Structures
A local power structure is at its core an aggregate of land-based interests that profit from increasingly intensive use of land. It is a set of property owners who see their futures as linked together because of a common desire to increase the value of their individual parcels. Wishing to avoid any land uses on adjacent parcels that might decrease the value of their properties, they come to believe that working together is to the benefit of each and everyone of them. Starting from the level of individual ownership of pieces of land, a "growth coalition" arises that develops a "we" feeling among its members even if they differ on other kinds of political and social issues.
This "we" feeling is reinforced by the fact that the pro-growth landed interests soon attract a set of staunch opponents--if not immediately, then soon after they are successful. These opponents are most often neighborhoods and environmentalists, which are sometimes aided by university students and left activists. The inevitable tensions between the growth coalition and its opponents led to increased suburbanization, urban renewal, ghettoization, and many of the other problems that plague American cities of the 21st century.
In economic terms, the "place entrepreneurs" at the center of the growth coalitions are trying to maximize "rents" from land and buildings, which is a little different than the goal of the corporate community -- maximizing profits from the sale of goods and services. As sociologists Jonathan Logan and Harvey Molotch explain:
Unlike the capitalist, the place entrepreneur's goal is not profit from production, but rent from trapping human activity in place. Besides sale prices and regular payments made by tenants to landlords, we take rent to include, more broadly, outlays made to realtors, mortgage lenders, title companies, and so forth. The people who are involved in generating rent are the investors in land and buildings and the professionals who serve them. We think of them as a special class among the privileged, analogous to the classic "rentiers" of a former age in a modern urban form. Not merely a residue of a disappearing social group, rentiers persist as a dynamic social force. (Logan & Molotch, 1987.)
The most typical way of intensifying land use is growth, and this growth usually expresses itself in a constantly rising population. A successful local elite is one that is able to attract the corporate plants and offices, the defense contracts, the federal and state agencies, and/or the educational and research establishments that lead to an expanded work force. An expanded work force and its attendant purchasing power in turn lead to an expansion of retail and other commercial activity, extensive land and housing development, and increased financial activity. It is because this chain of events is at the core of any developed locality that the city is for all intents and purposes a "growth machine," and those who dominate it are a "growth coalition."
Local growth coalitions and the corporate community, as owners of income-producing properties, have much in common and often work together, but their somewhat different ways of making money means that there are some political tensions and conflicts between them. They are different "segments" of the ownership class. That is, as owners and as employers of wage labor, they are in the same general economic category and share more in common than with non-owners. But they nonetheless are to some extent rivals because their interests in business dealings are not always exactly the same.
In particular, there is tension between growth coalitions and corporations because corporations have the ability to move if they think that local regulations are becoming too stringent or taxes and wages too high. A move by a major corporation can have a devastating impact on a local growth coalition. Thus, growth coalitions can fail. Cities can die, or even become ghost towns.
Moreover, this ability to move on the part of corporate capital contributes to the constant competition among rival cities for new capital investments, creating tensions among growth coalitions as well as between individual growth coalitions and the corporate community. The net result is often a "race to the bottom" as rival cities offer tax breaks, less environmental regulation, and other benefits to corporations in order to tempt them to relocate. Ironically, most studies of plant location suggest that environmental laws and local taxes are of minor importance in corporate decisions concerning the location or relocation of production facilities. A union-free environment and low-cost raw materials are the major factors.
Rather obviously, then, the most important activity of a local growth coalition is to provide the right conditions for outside investment. However, this preparation involves far more than providing level and plentiful acreage with a stream running through it. It also involves all those factors that make up what is called a "good business climate," such as low business taxes, a good infrastructure of municipal services, vigorous law enforcement, an eager and docile labor force, and a minimum of business regulations.
Place entrepreneurs expend considerable effort in keeping up with the changing locational needs of corporate capital. They take business school courses, read relevant trade journals, talk with local capitalists, go to business conferences, encourage real estate studies at local universities, and keep a close eye on what is happening in planning and governmental circles. In a word, they are constantly alert to the needs of big outside capital. They also engage in incessant boosterism, extolling the virtues of their local area to anyone who will listen.
Only in the largest cities, where major corporations and a few extremely rich families are wealthy enough to capture the profits of both land use and production, does the distinction between land-based local growth coalitions and a capital-based national power elite rooted in the corporate community tend to disappear. It may even be that the corporatization of real estate profits is the wave of the future. Huge real estate and development syndicates now move from city to city, and even country to country. But for now, and for understanding the history of local power for much of the 19th and 20th century, the distinction between two types of economic elites is an essential one.
Although the growth coalition is based in land ownership, it includes all those interests that profit from the intensification of land use. Thus, executives from the local bank, the savings and loan, the telephone company, the gas and electric company, and the local department store are often quite prominent as well. As in the case of the corporate community, the underlying unity within the growth coalition is most visibly expressed in the intertwining boards of directors among local companies. And, as with the corporate community, the central meeting points are most often the banks, where executives from the utilities companies and the department stores meet with the largest landlords and developers.
There is one other important component of the local growth coalition: the daily newspaper. The newspaper is deeply committed to local growth so that its circulation and, even more important, its pages of advertising, will continue to rise. No better expression of this commitment can be found than a statement by the publisher of the San Jose Mercury News in the 1950s. When asked why he had consistently favored development on beautiful orchard lands that turned San Jose into one of the largest cities in California within a period of two decades, he replied, "Trees do not read newspapers" (Downie, 1970, p. 112). However, the unique feature of the newspaper is that it is not committed to growth on any particular piece of land or in any one area of the city, so it often attains the role of "growth statesman" among any competing interests within the growth coalition.
The newspaper's publisher or editor is deferred to as a voice of reason. Competing interests often regard newspaper executives as general community leaders, as ombudsmen and arbiters of internal bickering, and at times, as enlightened third parties who can restrain the short-term profiteers in the interest of a more stable, long-term, and properly planned growth. The newspaper becomes the reformist influence, the "voice of the community," restraining the competing subunits, especially the small-scale arriviste "fast-buck artists" among them.
The growth coalitions also have a well-crafted set of rationales, created over the course of many decades, to justify their actions to the general public. Most of all, this ideology is based in the idea that growth is about jobs, not about profits:
Perhaps the key ideological prop for the growth machine, especially in terms of sustaining support from the working-class majority, is the claim that growth "makes jobs." This claim is aggressively promulgated by developers, builders, and local chambers of commerce. It becomes part of the statesman talk of editorialists and political officials. Such people do not speak of growth as useful to profits--rather, they speak of it as necessary for making jobs. (Molotch, 1976, p. 320.)
Thanks in part to this rhetoric about being responsible citizens who just want to help everyone by creating jobs, the local growth coalition sometimes includes a useful junior partner--the building trade unions. They often are highly visible on the side of the growth coalition in battles against environmentalists and neighborhood groups. In reality, local growth does not create new jobs in the economy as a whole, which is a function of corporate and governmental decisions beyond the province of any single community. However, local growth does determine where the new jobs will be located, which is what matters from the point of view of the building trades unions. For that reason, it is in their interest to help their local growth coalition in its competition with other localities.
Due to the separation of local, state, and national government in the United States, the wily members of the local growth coalition are able to have it both ways. At the state and national levels they support those politicians who oppose, in the name of fiscal and monetary responsibility, the kinds of government policies that might create more jobs, whereas at the local level they talk in terms of their attempts to create more jobs. Their goal is never profits, but only jobs.
Although a concern with growth is at the basis of each local power structure, every city enters into the competition with a different set of priorities and strategies for achieving it. Calculations have to be made about what investment possibilities are the most desirable and possible based upon such factors as the availability of natural resources; the nature of the climate; the proximity of oceans, lakes, and rivers; the skills of the work force; and the past history of successes and failure in growth competition. Rather obviously, there is a clear preference for clean industries that require highly paid skilled workers over dirty industries that use unskilled workers, but dirty industries will be accepted if other locales win the clean ones. Attractive beach-front towns are not as likely as inland cities to seek out just any type of industry; their property can bring in more money as sites for tourist resorts and convention centers. When an area has little or nothing to offer, as in the case of most of Nevada, it settles for gambling and prostitution to create a Las Vegas. Then, too, growth strategies can change over time; when Atlantic City lost out as a "nice" resort, it adopted the Nevada strategy and turned to legalized gambling.
Historical factors also enter into growth strategies. If one locale gets there first with a once-in-a-generation opportunity, such as a stockyard or a railroad, over which competition was very fierce in the 19th century, then nearby communities have to settle for lesser opportunities even though they have very similar natural conditions. On the other hand, earlier successes may lock an area into relationships and obligations that make it very difficult for it to take advantage of new opportunities.
Successful unionization by workers in one city can lead to new opportunities for another. In fact, that is the basic reason for the movement of many industries from the North to the South in the course of the 20th century. The fiercely racist, paternalistic, and anti-union Southern city elites were able to provide manufacturers with cheap and docile labor forces. They had their police and sheriffs run union organizers out of town the minute they arrived. This union-free strategy was working for cities in South Carolina, Tennessee, and Mississippi as recently as the 1990s, when lower transportation costs and free trade agreements made it possible for manufacturers to seek even higher profits by moving to Mexico and China.
The growth-coalition hypothesis leads to certain expectations about the relationship between power structures and local government. Rather obviously, the primary role of government is to promote growth according to this view. It is not the only function, but it is the central one, and the one most often ignored by those who write about city government. Local government promotes growth in several ways, the most visible of which are the construction of the necessary streets, sewers, and other public improvements and the provision of the proper municipal services. But zoning, building standards, and many other government regulations also matter greatly in keeping property valuable, as home builders also realized very early in the 20th century (Gotham, 2002, Chapter 2). While all of this is going on, the city departments of planning and public works, among several, become allies of the growth coalition with the hope that their departments will grow and prosper (Mollenkopf, 1983).
In addition, government often provides the funds for the boosterism that gives the city name recognition and an image of togetherness, which are considered important by the growth coalitions in attracting industry. Sometimes the money for boosterism is given directly to the government by the local Chamber of Commerce. In some places, it is given to an Industrial Development Commission or a Convention and Visitors Bureau that is jointly funded by government and private enterprise.
Then, too, government officials are expected to be the growth coalition's ambassadors to outside investors, traveling to meet with them in their home cities or showing them the local community and answering their questions when they come to inspect it for possible investment.
Since a great many specific government decisions can affect land values and growth potentialities, leaders of the growth coalition are prime participants in local government. Their involvement is even greater than that of corporate capitalists at the national level, where the power elite can rely to some extent on such "signals" as stock prices, interest rates, and the level of new investments to tell government officials what they think of current policies. The growth coalition is the most over-represented group on local city councils, as numerous studies show (Logan & Molotch, 1987). It also is well represented on planning commissions, zoning boards, water boards, and parking authorities, which are the decision-making bodies of greatest importance to it. However, this direct involvement in government is usually not the first or only contact with government for members of the growth coalition. They often have previous service on the local Chamber of Commerce's committees and commissions concerned with growth, planning, roadways, and off-street parking.
The idea that the heart of a local power structure is provided by those businesses concerned with local real estate values explains what had been considered a perplexing issue in what was once called the "community power literature:" the relative absence of industrial executives as top leaders within the city. Industrial corporations provide financial support and leadership that are often important within the Chamber of Commerce. Their executives are active in community service organizations if the company is one in which such activity is considered part of good citizenship. But in most cases such corporations and their executives are not central figures at the local level. Why would this be the case if capitalists rule America?
A theory that distinguishes between land-based growth elites and national-level corporate capitalists explains this finding by the fact that manufacturers usually are not concerned with land values unless they are also big landowners as well. Their focus is on making profits through the sale of products in regional, national, and international markets. For an industrialist, any given locality is merely a site for production that can be abandoned with a fair amount of ease if it becomes too costly, as the great concern with plant closings attests. Their power is not in their involvement in local government but in their ability to move, which makes the local growth coalition eager to satisfy their requests and at the same time creates an underlying tension between the two sets of interests. Manufacturers provide money for boosterism, urban planning, and political campaigns, but it is land-based elites that run the show.
Growth coalitions are relatively unique to the United States because land has been commodified to a degree that is found in no European industrialized democracy. Capitalists and corporations are everywhere, but not place entrepreneurs. Right from the start, many of the richest Americans were landowners and land speculators, including George Washington, who was eager to spread his holdings through involvement in land companies. This difference can be seen most dramatically in the percentage of housing that is publicly owned, which was 46% in England, 37% in France, and less than 1% in the United States in 1980 (Jackson, 1985, p. 224).
Moreover, because the governmental system has national, state and local levels, local growth coalitions were able to take advantage of new land markets as the country conquered the Native Americans. The federal system of government made it possible to resist control of land from the top by national-level landowners who could work through the government in Washington (Logan & Molotch, 1987; Molotch, 1999). In addition, the commodification of land and the decentralized nature of American government go a long way in explaining why there is no decent housing for low-income people in the United States; it is the pressure of the local growth coalitions that create both concentrated areas of low-income housing and resistance to decent public housing (c.f. Sites, 2003, Chapter 5).
The distinction between a national-level power elite based in the corporate community and local-level growth coalitions based in land and buildings shows once again why it is necessary to study power structures anew in each country.
Challengers to the Growth Coalitions
The growth coalition faces considerable opposition when it impacts neighborhoods or the environment through highrises, new freeways, industrial pollution, noise, dirty air, and many other factors. People in neighborhoods want to preserve the amenities that they have. They do not like the congestion that comes with growth. They often organize to fight new growth or any other intrusions on their way of life. But this does not mean neighborhood resistance is inherently progressive. To the contrary, it sometimes involves racial, religious, or ethnic exclusion.
In abstract terms, the basic conflict at the local level between growth coalitions and neighborhoods is one of "exchange value" versus "use value." Growth coalitions want to make more money off their land and buildings, which can lead to major changes in neighborhoods if developers want to construct highrise apartments, office buildings, or strip malls. The people in the neighborhoods, on the other hand, see their homes as a place of safety and comfort, and as a place to raise children and mingle with people of their own kind. Even in the fast-paced modern world, neighborhoods are imbued with deep sentiments and inspire strong attachments. True, people want their homes to retain their resale value, and in this day and age, to rise in value, but their primary concern remains their "quality of life." They are therefore NIMBYs--Not In My Back Yard.
Moreover, the residents of a city want the local government to spend a greater share of its budget on municipal services, social services, parks, and other amenities. But the growth coalitions want the lion's share of the money to go to physical infrastructure and anything else that aids growth. Once people are in the city, the growth coalitions do not worry much about them. Its members are very shortsighted if spans of decades are taken into consideration.
In the short run, growth coalitions usually win out over people who are protesting intrusions into their neighborhoods or asking that tax monies be used for use values like parks. The residents who can afford to leave grow tired of the battle or are bought off by the developers. They move to land outside the city, and they join with other recent arrivals to the new scene to insure that this living space remains inviolate. They incorporate the area as a new city, a "suburb," which is primarily focused on neighborhood use values, or was until huge malls and office complexes came along.
However, victories for the pro-growth forces in battles with neighborhoods are by no means guaranteed. When growth coalitions are weakened by the departure of large corporations, or by an inability to cope with racial tensions, they can fragment and lose control to coalitions of neighborhoods, environmentalists, and left activists.
It is also true that not all members of the growth coalitions are completely crass in their dealings with local citizens. Some of them believe in a few use values for residents, as long as their own taxes can be kept to a minimum. Furthermore, there are middle-class "reformers" who want to save the city from itself. In the Progressive Era, the moderate elements within growth coalitions sometimes joined with reformers to work for the amenities sought by neighborhoods. These reformist urges were especially strong where the growth coalitions faced serious political challenges from Democratic Party political machines and the Socialist Party, as they did between 1880 and 1920. These challenges are discussed in a minute, after a summary statement on the dynamics behind suburbanization.
The American Suburbs
Suburbs have been part of the American scene since the early 19th century, when the steamboat and regular stagecoach lines ("omnibuses") were the mode of urban escape. They increased in size and popularity as soon as there were railroad and trolley lines, sometimes as early as the 1830s, as in the case of Brookline, a Boston suburb. Thus, the dream of living in the quiet countryside in an idyllic little town is deeply imbedded in American culture (Jackson, 1985).
The urge toward suburbs accelerated in the late-19th century as industrialization and further railroadization impacted the cities in negative ways. First of all, factories and railroads became a huge source of environmental pollution. The air was terrible in many large cities, such as Chicago. The local growth coalitions tried to do something about this problem, but the railroad and manufacturing magnates had the upper hand, and rejected efforts at amelioration (Gonzalez, 2005). Second, the large manufacturing plants in the cities had to have workers, and the result was an increase in low-income immigrant populations from Eastern and Southern Europe, who were looked down upon by the established middle class--and craft workers--of Northern European origins. Thus, ethnocentrism and class snobbery contributed to the movement of the middle-class to the suburbs.
Sumber: http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/local/growth_coalition_theory.html
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