Although considerable scholarship documents the failures of urban renewal, little has been written on the challenges cities faced in implementing programs to address local needs. This article explores the political challenges of San Antonio in creating an urban renewal program. It demonstrates the role of the Housing Acts of 1949 and 1954 in stimulating the city’s planning processes in a political atmosphere otherwise hostile to expanded government functions.
Students of urban history are quite familiar with the transformations that occurred in regard to planning and government in American cities between 1900 and 1930. By the first decade of the twentieth century, the city commission government and the city beautiful movement emerged as important tools in the search for order in American cities. That changed by the 1920s as those two earlier "solutions" became increasingly problematic to those looking for a more efficient government and an ordered environment.1 In planning, the city beautiful movement-associated with grand boulevards and city centers, but also an effort to coordinate a variety of public works-was the rage in the first decade of the twentieth century but gave way to the city practical or city efficient planning movement by the end of World War I. Commission government followed a similar path. Although once securing the endorsement of Progressives such as Brand Whitlock, Seth Low, Theodore Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson, councilmanager government replaced commission government as the darling of reformers after World War I due to perceived structural weakness in the latter.
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