Too Big Not to Fail: Federalism and the Failure of Local Urban Redevelopment Policies
Year: 2010
Type: preprint
Abstract: Although Congress continues to pass urban redevelopment programs and local actors attempt to use these policies to address urban problems, many policies do not live up to initial expectations. Urban policy scholars tend to focus on local political or economic arrangements to explain this phenomenon, while public policy scholars emphasize the role of special interest or bureaucratic influence on policy success or failure. Neither approach studies the ideas and institutional arrangements motivating urban policy, nor do they do so over time. In this paper, I suggest a new framework for exploring urban redevelopment policy: intercurrence, which is a theoretical framework and analytical lens used in the subfield of American Political Development (APD). Using the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) as a case study and congressional hearings as my unit of analysis, I argue that challenges to successful policy implementation can best be appreciated by understanding how ideological commitments to certain ideas and institutional arrangements inherent to American principles of separation of powers and federalism circumscribe policy creation and implementation at the local level.
Source: SSRN Electronic Journal
Author: Amy Widestrom
Institution: Arcadia University
Language: English
Subfield: Urban Studies
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W1503990029