Federal Urban Policy, City Parishes, and CST

I just read, in The Weekly Standard, an interesting review of two new-ish books on the "decline of cities" and urban policy. (I'm very interested in this topic, about which my wife, Nicole Stelle Garnett, and our co-blogger Vince Rougeau write and teach).

As described by the reviewer, Harry Siegel, Douglas Rae's City: Urbanism and Its End, analyzes the process and causes of New Haven's fall "from a working-class manufacturing center to a cluster of dilapidated housing projects." This fall -- which, believe me, is real -- took place notwithstanding the fact that New Haven was the "flagship city of the Great Society's 'Model Cities' program" and "received far more federal dollars per capital than any other city."

E. Michael Jones's book, "The Slaughter of the Cities: Urban Renewal as Ethnic Cleansing," offers, Siegel reports, a "paranoid and disturbing perspective": Jones's argument is that "a WASP elite that ran the federal government used southern blacks as its unwitting pawns in a vast 'psychological warfare campaign' against unassimilated white ethnics, particularly urban Catholics and their parishes." Siegel makes it clear that Jones's arguments are uncautious, and often offensive -- particularly in his apparent insistence that urban Catholics who resisted integration were blameless victims, and not racists. With that caveat, though, Siegel suggests that "Jones is onto something significant": "The destruction of the working class," he says, "homeowning urban neighborhoods was not . . . just the necessary outcome of economic and demographic changes but also the result of ill-considered government policies written by urban planners often contemptuous of Catholics and patronizing towards blacks."

I have not read the books, and so cannot endorse them. Still, it strikes me that their subject -- and the ideas raised in Siegel's review -- are relevant to "Mirror of Justice" readers for at least two reasons: First, I kept thinking, as I read the review, about several exchanges we've had, over the past few weeks, about "subsidiarity," and what it really means. Next, and more generally, I'd love to hear others' thoughts about what CST has to say about "urbanism" -- not only about criminal justice, welfare policy, housing policy, etc., all of which affects life in our cities, but about "urbanism" more generally. Do Catholic claims about the person have any implications for how we *ought* to structure our cities and communities?

Rick

UPDATE: I received an e-mail from Tom Messner, a student of mine (who also contributes to the Christus Victor blog), commenting on this post. He writes:

I think Jones’ reflection on the disasters of urban/social planning . . . suggests we should . . . rephrase (your) question to read: "What we ought NOT to do in structuring our cities and communities, in light of Catholic Social Teaching?" I don’t know that much about subsidiarity, so I’ll use this definition: “As a person with an eternal destiny, man cannot find his fulfillment in the state or in any temporal order. From this arises the principle of subsidiarity, which denies the claim of the state to total competence.” (C. Rice). If ever the state has proved itself totally INCOMPETENT, surely it has done so in its “structuring of cities and communities” in certain neighborhoods in Detroit, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Boston (the four cities on which Jones focuses). So I think maybe one of the most basic things subsidiarity might "mean” with respect to urban planning is a very MINIMAL role for the state: it’s got a bad track record. This may be too obvious and simplistic; but maybe it’s not, at least not as some sort of baseline.

Tom also observes that "the purpose of civil society and of human law is to promote the common good, which is ‘the sum total of social conditions which allow people, either as groups or as individuals, to reach their fulfillment more fully and more easily.’" He then goes on to offer some thoughts about what this statement means in the context of urban development and policy.

I've encouraged Tom to post his thoughts over at Christus Victor.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Another Notre Dame law student (and blogger) has noted her disagreement with Tom's take (supra) on CST and urban planning. Check out "View From the Dome," here. It sounds like VFTD would apply CST principles to the story described by Rae and Jones in a very different way. I'd love to hear more.

One quick observation: VFTD mentions her views on the "prudence of deregulation of housing." I take it that Rae and Jones are not discussing so much the question whether habitability rules, rent control, etc., actually help or hurt low-income persons and families, but broader issues of "urbanism," city planning, zoning, etc. That is -- and perhaps VFTD agrees -- one could believe (as I, tentatively, do) that many so-called urban-renewal policies have been disastrous in their aesthetic, social, economic, and moral effects, while *still* opposing the "deregulation of housing," or without also believing that, say, many features of landlord-tenant and housing-code law lead to the (unintended) consequence of shrinking the pool of housing available to poor people.

Rick

RG