Federal policy and postwar urban decline: A case of government complicity?

Many urban commentators have implicated the federal government in the decline of central cities in the decades just after World War II. They claim that federal policies disproportionately favored suburban development over much needed urban redevelopment and exacerbated the deconcentration and decentralization of people and capital. Close scrutiny reveals flaws in this argument and four of them are examined in this article: the core premise that suburban growth and population loss in the central cities are inversely related, the lack of attention to the actual chronology of events, the failure to address the geographic incidence of population loss from the central cities, and the deemphasizing of the role of the private sector, often acting with government support. The article concludes with a brief reflection on the tenacity of the complicity claim.