The implications of contemporary redistribution trends for national urban policy

Abstract

Fueled United and social by States an forces, changed intense the demographic apace interaction during and of the industrial technological, 1970s. On landscape an interregional economic of the Fueled and social forces, the demographic and industrial landscape of the United States changed ap ce during he 1970s. On a int regi nal scale, we witnessed the continuing redistribution of population and economic activity away from the traditional northern urban-industrial heartland to the more recently developing southern and western regions. On an intraregional scale, the locus of residential, commercial and industrial growth increasingly shifted away from metropolitan central cities to their suburbs and exurbs and even on into relatively remote nonmetropolitan sectors of each region. Indeed, for the bulk of this nations metropolitan core cities, the absolute declines in middle-income population and employment opportunities have been so substantial that some scholars have begun to question whether they can, or even should, maintain the dominant residential and commercial positions they once held (Baer, 1976; Muller, 1978). In the wake of accelerating dispersion of population and jobs, a number of federal policies have been implemented to mitigate the social and economic problems that redistribution trends have engendered for many core cities and their inhabitants. These policies, which were titularly consolidated in 1978 under the rubric of the Carter Administration's National Urban Policy, appear to have been, at best, marginally successful and, in some instances, counterproductive, inadvertently generating side effects that have further weakened city economies. The reason for this lack of success, in my judgment, rests with the failure of many urban policies to give adequate recognition and weight to contemporary technological, economic and social dynamics underlying the locational decisions of people and firms, and the corresponding, changing functional roles large cities most effectively perform in our own advanced service economy. The aim of this paper is to examine contemporary interand intraregional redistribution trends with an eye toward drawing implications