Saving America's Cities

by Lizabeth Cohen

    29. Anthony Pangaro, interview by Lizabeth Cohen, June 24, 2009, Boston, MA.

    30. For housing starts in New York City, Alan S. Oser, “Logue Forecasts 1973 Slowdown in U.D.C. Pace,” NYT, August 12, 1973; 86 percent were in cities large and small.

    31. For Logue’s disgust with behavior of supposed liberals Reid and Ottinger, see Logue, interview, Steen, August 3, 1988, Boston, MA, 38.

    32. Quoted in Brilliant, Urban Development Corporation, 142.

    33. Elizabeth Simonoff, “Town Will Sue UDC,” PT, July 13, 1972.

    34. Logue, interview, Jones, Tape 3:36.

    35. Dan Margulies, “Court Backs UDC,” PT, September 7, 1972; “UDC Legislation Stalls,” PT, September 28, 1972.

    36. Logue, interview, Steen, August 3, 1988, Boston, MA, 40.

    37. Martin F. Nolan, “Staying Out of Suburbia,” BG, June 1, 1973.

    38. Logue, interview, Steen, August 3, 1988, Boston, MA, 40; Logue, interview, Steen, January 6, 1991, Boston, MA, 24–26; Panel “Housing Unbuilt: Politics Over People,” in Part 3: “The Current Status of Housing,” in the exhibition “Policy and Design for Housing: Lessons of the Urban Development Corporation 1968–1975,” http://www.udchousing.org/exhibition_3.htm, Architectural League of New York, Urban Center, New York, NY; NYSUDC Annual Report 1971, 55; NYSUDC Annual Report 1973, 11, 54, 56, 60; George Vecsey, “Babylon Officials Reject Wyandanch Housing Plan,” NYT, August 17, 1973.

    39. “The Story of ‘The Suburban Destruction Corporation’ (SDC): E. J. Rogue, President, and the Warm and Wonderful World of Westchester,” MDL.

    40. Nancy Maron, “A Gingerly Step into Westchester Taken by Logue,” NYT, February 22, 1970; Joseph Berger, “Paul Davidoff, 54: Planner Challenged Suburbs’ Zone Rules,” NYT, December 28, 1984. Davidoff kept a significant clippings file on the UDC’s Fair Share Housing struggle; “UDC Westchester Clippings, 1969–1973,” PD.

    41. Sidney Eaton Boyle, “Moses: Go Slow on Housing,” Reporter Dispatch (White Plains, NY), November 2, 1972.

    42. Pangaro, interview.

    43. On Nixon’s moratorium, see Pritchett, “Which Urban Crisis?,” 279–82; Brilliant, Urban Development Corporation, 145–46, 149–50, 161; Loewenstein, Private Benefits, Public Costs, 60–61; Freemark, “Entrepreneurial State,” 44–57, 295–96. In a remembrance at an AIA memorial to Logue in May 2000, Paul Byard traced the UDC’s collapse back to when “Richard Nixon closed the little spigot of section 236 and our descent began as well”; “2nd Annual Ratensky Housing Lecture, Celebrating the Work of Housing and Planning Czar, Edward J. Logue,” New York Chapter, AIA, Seagram Tower, New York City, May 24, 2000.

    44. George Romney to Casper W. Weinberger, n.d. but late 1972, and George Romney, “Notes for Speech in Roosevelt Room, December 22, 1972,” both in George Romney Archives, Box 10-P, Folder “Office of Management and Budget,” in Freemark, “Entrepreneurial State,” 56.

    45. Michael Kranish, “Nixon, Romney Relationship Came to Frosty End,” BG, June 27, 2007.

    46. Richard Nixon, “Address to the Nation on Domestic Programs,” August 8, 1969, Public Papers of the Presidents, Richard Nixon, 1969, 637–38, and “Annual Budget Message to the Congress, Fiscal Year 1974,” January 29, 1973, Public Papers of the Presidents, Richard Nixon, 1973, 46–47, quoted in Pritchett, “Which Urban Crisis?,” 278, 280.

    47. Logue, “Looking Ahead—Looking Back in Housing, Planning, and Community Development,” March 22, 1976, Paper Presented at Plenary Workshop, “Design: Strategies of Habitat,” National Congress of Planning, Joint AIP/ASPO National Planning Conference, EJL, 2002 Addition, Box 22, Folder “Looking Ahead,” 2.

    48. Murray Schumach, “12 Mayors, Alarmed at U.S. Budget, to Meet Here on Monday,” NYT, January 31, 1973.

    49. “Federal Housing Policies and Programs—the Federal Moratorium of January 8, 1973,” EJL, 2002 Accession, Box 22, Folder “Federal Housing Policies and Programs, 1973.” Logue called for greater federal funding and more flexibility for state and local government implementation in “Testimony of Edward J. Logue, President of the New York State Urban Development Corporation Before the Senate Sub-Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs,” July 27, 1973, NYSA, Series 12309, Subseries 97, Box 23.

    50. For analysis of impact of revenue sharing and block grants, see Roger Biles, The Fate of Cities: Urban America and the Federal Government, 1945–2000 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2011), 188–91.

    51. Logue, “The Idea of America Is Choice,” in Qualities of Life, Papers Prepared for the Commission on Critical Choices for Americans, vol. 7 (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1976), 18.

    52. Pritchett, “Which Urban Crisis?,” 281–82; Alice O’Connor, “Swimming Against the Tide: A Brief History of Federal Policy in Poor Communities,” in Urban Problems and Community Development, ed. Ronald F. Ferguson and William T. Dickens (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1999), 77–137, particularly 108–10; Yonah Freemark, “Roosevelt Island: Exception to a City in Crisis,” JUH 37, no. 3 (May 2011): 2, 16; National Low Income Housing Coalition, “40 Years Ago: August 22, President Ford Signs Housing and Community Development Act of 1974,” http://nlihc.org/article/40-years-ago-august-22-president-ford-signs-housing-and-community-development-act-1974; Nicholas Dagen Bloom and Matthew Gordon Lasner, eds., Affordable Housing in New York: The People, Places, and Policies That Transformed a City (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), 197–98; Susan S. Fainstein, The Just City (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010), 92.

    53. Edith Evens Asbury, “Hamilton Deplores Housing-Fund Cutoff,” NYT, January 9, 1973.

    54. Logue, interview, Jones, Tape 4:8; Logue similarly told Steen, “I got buildings that are starting, buildings that are three-quarters finished, buildings that are halfway up, and they’ll all be bankrupt without these subsidies”; Logue, interview, Steen, August 3, 1988, Boston, MA, 3.

    55. Logue, interview, Steen, August 3, 1988, Boston, MA, 2.

    56. Mary Perot Nichols, “The Martin Luther King Memorial Ripoff,” New Republic, July 24, 1976, 21.

    57. Schumach, “12 Mayors, Alarmed at U.S. Budget, to Meet Here on Monday”; Edith Evans Asbury, “Federal Freeze Imperils Housing Projects in Area,” NYT, February 4, 1973.

    58. Logue, interview, Jones, Tape 4:8; Restoring Credit and Confidence: A Reform Program for New York State and Its Public Authorities; A Report to the Governor by the New York State Moreland Act Commission on the Urban Development Corporation and Other State Financing Agencies, March 31, 1976 (hereafter Moreland), 141–42.

    59. Logue on how the moratorium “worried a lot of people in the financial community,” Logue, interview by Benjamin and Hurd, Rockefeller in Retrospect, 211.

    60. NYSUDC Annual Report 1973, 5.

    61. William Marlin, “After the Pratfall: UDC Dusts Off the Debris of Default,” AR 158, no. 6 (Mid-October 1975): 121.

    62. Francis X. Clines, “Rockefeller Gets a Ford Accolade,” NYT, December 5, 1973; Alfonso A. Narvaez, “2-Year Study Is Projected to Define Critical Choices,” NYT, December 12, 1973; Frank Lynn, “A Zestful Rockefeller Steers ‘Choices’ Study,” NYT, February 27, 1974; Richard Norton Smith, On His Own Terms: A Life of Nelson Rockefeller (New York: Random House, 2014), 637–39.

    63. Loewenstein, Private Benefits, Public Costs, 8, 64–65; Logue, interview by Benjamin and Hurd, Rockefeller in Retrospect, 210.

    64. John Stainton, interview by Lizabeth Cohen, May 30, 2007, Jamaica Plain, MA. Robert Hazen also stressed that Logue always assumed that Rockefeller would be there to bail him out; Robert Hazen, interview by Lizabeth Cohen, June 14, 2007, New York, NY.

    65. On the economic crisis facing the nation, New York State, and New York City, see Seymour P. Lachman and Robert Polner, The Man Who Saved New York: Hugh Carey and the Great Fiscal Crisis
of 1975 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010); Marlin, “After the Pratfall,” 122; Robert Bailey, The Crisis Regime: The MAC, the EFCB, and the Political Impact of the New York City Financial Crisis (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984); Ralph Blumenthal, “Prayer for Help: Unusual Ways a City Coped in 70s Crisis,” NYT, December 27, 2002. On Rockefeller’s role as vice president, Smith, On His Own Terms, 671–77.

  On the restructuring of New York’s economy, see Lizabeth Cohen and Brian Goldstein, “Governing at the Tipping Point: Shaping the City’s Role in Economic Development,” in Summer in the City: John Lindsay, New York, and the American Dream, ed. Joseph P. Viteritti (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 163–92; Lachman and Polner, Man Who Saved New York, 94; Joshua B. Freeman, Working-Class New York: Life and Labor Since World War II (New York: New Press, 2000); Kim Moody, From Welfare State to Real Estate: Regime Change in New York City, 1974 to the Present (New York: New Press, 2007).

    66. Logue, interview, Steen, July 11, 1991, Boston, MA, 17.

    67. On interest rate rise and its causes and consequences, see Marlin, “After the Pratfall,” 122; Brilliant, Urban Development Corporation, 154–55.

    68. For events leading up to the collapse of Logue’s leadership of the UDC in February 1975 and its immediate aftermath, see Marlin, “After the Pratfall,” 121–22; Brilliant, Urban Development Corporation, 149–80; NYSUDC Annual Report 1974, 6, 15; Logue, interview, Schussheim, 35–37; John Zuccotti, interview by Lizabeth Cohen, December 10, 2007, New York, NY; Richard Ravitch, interview by Lizabeth Cohen, October 22, 2007, New York, NY; Steven R. Weisman, “Nelson Rockefeller’s Pill: The UDC,” WM, June 1975, 35–44.

    69. Logue, interview by Benjamin and Hurd, Rockefeller in Retrospect, 212; Linda Greenhouse, “Governor Orders Inquiry to Save Faltering U.D.C.,” NYT, February 6, 1975; Alan S. Oser, “How the U.D.C.’s Reach Came to Exceed Its Grasp,” NYT, March 16, 1975; Logue, interview, Steen, July 11, 1991, Boston, MA, 9; Weisman, “Nelson Rockefeller’s Pill,” 37; Michael Kramer and Sam Roberts, “I Never Wanted to Be Vice-President of Anything!”: An Investigative Biography of Nelson Rockefeller (New York: Basic Books, 1976), 146–47.

    70. Joseph P. Fried, “Urban Development Unit Curbed on New Projects,” NYT, October 6, 1974; $1 million a day figure from Myer Kutz, “How Could It Happen to the UDC?,” Planning 41 (May 1975): 14.

    71. Richard L. Dunham, Chair, “Report of the Task Force on the Urban Development Corporation,” December 26, 1974, NYSA, Series A0507, Subseries 78, Box 1; Paul L. Montgomery, “Wilson Unit Asks Halt in New Financing by U.D.C.,” NYT, December 27, 1974; Brilliant, Urban Development Corporation, 174–75; Weisman, “Nelson Rockefeller’s Pill,” 40, 43. On Wilson’s promise not to fire Logue, see Logue, interview, Jones, Tape 4:16.

    72. Lachman and Polner, Man Who Saved New York, 82; Greenhouse, interview.

    73. Allan Talbot, interview by Lizabeth Cohen, June 13, 2007, New York, NY.

    74. Logue, “A Farewell Message to UDC Staff,” February 6, 1975, NYSA, Series A0507, Subseries 78, Box 1.

    75. “Securities: A Moral Issue,” Time, March 10, 1975.

    76. Marlin, “After the Pratfall,” 122; Brilliant, Urban Development Corporation, 177; Litke, interview; by spring, the UDC staff had been reduced by more than a third.

    77. “Preliminary Memorandum on Behalf of Certain Officers, Former Officers and Directors of the Urban Development Corporation,” n.d. but 1975; copy thanks to Robert Hazen.

    78. Brilliant, Urban Development Corporation, 174. Also see “Carey Considering Developer as Chairman of State’s U.D.C.,” NYT, January 20, 1975.

    79. Richard Ravitch, So Much to Do: A Full Life of Business, Politics, and Confronting Fiscal Crisis (New York: Public Affairs Press, 2014), 65; for Ravitch’s perspective on his role, see 51–70, which includes quotes; also Ravitch, interview, for detailed discussion of his involvement in Roosevelt Island and his efforts to salvage the UDC.

    80. Other sources on Ravitch’s involvement with the UDC bailout include: Zuccotti, interview; Lefkowitz, interview; Logue, interview, Steen, October 31, 1986, Lincoln, MA, 27.

    81. Ravitch, interview.

    82. Celestine Bohlen, “Moreland Act of 1907; Governor’s Strong Suit,” NYT, December 15, 1988; Edward Hudson, “Orville H. Schell Jr., 78, Dies; Lawyer and Ballet Chairman,” NYT, June 19, 1987; Frank Lynn, “Carey Picks a Prosecutor for Nursing Home Inquiry,” NYT, January 7, 1975.

    83. Much of what follows is drawn from Moreland. All the files, including hearing transcripts, for the UDC Moreland Act Commission are all in NYSA, Series 11449.

    84. Logue, interview, Steen, July 11, 1991, Boston, MA, 43; “Edward N. Costikyan, Adviser to New York Politicians, Is Dead at 87,” NYT, June 23, 2012; MLogue, interview.

    85. Pangaro, interview; Ellen Logue, interview; Logue, interview, Jones, Tape 4:24–27; Ravitch, interview; Brilliant, Urban Development Corporation, 173–80; Zuccotti, interview. For Logue testimony, see Statement of Edward J. Logue, October 20, 1975, and transcripts from October 20 and October 21, 1975, in NYSA, Series 11449, Sub-series 98, Box 9, and quotes and descriptions in Linda Greenhouse, “Logue Sees U.D.C. as ‘Whipping Boy,’” NYT, October 21, 1975; “Staff of New York State’s UDC Warned of Financial Peril in ’71, Hearings Show,” WSJ, October 21, 1975; “Logue Attributes Collapse of U.D.C. to Miscalculation of City’s Bankers,” NYT, October 22, 1975; Linda Greenhouse, “Lessons to Be Learned from U.D.C.’s Collapse,” NYT, November 9, 1975; “UDC’s Fiscal Woes Wore Beyond Control of Any New Yorker, Rockefeller Testifies,” WSJ, December 4, 1975.

    86. On accounting challenges at the UDC, see Logue, interview, Jones, Tape 4:14; Logue, interview, Steen, January 6, 1991, Boston, MA, 49. Logue also struggled against the conservative and cautious views of New York State controller Arthur Levitt, who never favored moral obligation bonds: David K. Shipler, “Levitt Criticizes Bidding Policy of Unit for Urban Development,” NYT, April 3, 1972; Logue, interview, Steen, March 3, 1986, Lincoln, MA, 11; Logue, interview, Steen, July 11, 1991, Boston, MA, 7; Lefkowitz, interview.

    87. Linda Greenhouse, “Expert Criticizes U.D.C.’s Operation,” NYT, October 16, 1975; this was called a “negative interest spread.”

    88. Logue message to Moss, December 9, 1971, quoted in Greenhouse, “Logue Sees U.D.C. as ‘Whipping Boy.’” For observations on Logue’s lack of sufficient attention to finances, see Annmarie Hauck Walsh, The Public’s Business: The Politics and Practices of Government Corporations (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1980), 271; Lefkowitz, interview. Logue sometimes admitted as much himself, as when he recounted Robert Weaver saying, “Oh that Logue, he doesn’t give a shit about money,” and added, “And in a sense that was true I guess”; Logue, interview, Jones, Tape 1:ii.

    89. Stainton, interview; for Moss’s feeling that Logue was ignoring his advice, see Moreland, 139.

    90. Litke, interview.

    91. For Schell quote, Linda Greenhouse, “Hearings to Begin on UDC Collapse,” NYT, October 12, 1975; Kutz, “How Could It Happen to the UDC?,” 14.

    92. Logue, interview, Steen, July 11, 1991, Boston, MA, 34, 37, where Logue claimed to have “never been a believer in direct democracy.”

    93. Lefkowitz, interview; Logue, interview, Steen, March 3, 1986, Lincoln, MA, 11. On Woods’s testimony and defense of himself, see Linda Greenhouse, “Logue Is Called Deficient in His Grasp of Banking,” NYT, October 24, 1975. In response to questions about why he did not push harder for reforms, Woods said defiantly, “I had not been put in as a watering can to pour cold water on management’s activities.”

    94. Quoted in Linda Greenhouse, “Panel Reports U.D.C. Collapse Was Result of 3 Wrong Moves,” NYT, May 27, 1976.

    95. Moreland, 223–28.

    96. Louis K. Loewenstein, “The New York State Urban Development Corpor
ation—a Forgotten Failure or a Precursor of the Future?,” JAIP 44, no. 3 (July 1978): 270; Loewenstein, Private Benefits, Public Costs, 115.

    97. Paul Goldberger, “U.D.C.’s Architecture Has Raised Public Standard,” NYT, March 3, 1975.

    98. Ravitch, interview; Marlin, “After the Pratfall,” reported spending on architecture a frequent criticism of the UDC but argued for the importance of its contribution in the long run, 123–24; the Wilson Task Force had also found that hiring expensive architects brought about “substantially higher” expenditures.

    99. Logue, interview, Steen, January 6, 1991, Boston, MA, 43–44; Logue, interview, Steen, July 11, 1991, Boston, MA, 11; NYSUDC Annual Report 1972 bragged about the expected savings, 74.

  100. Moreland, 14, 37–46. Logue was closely questioned on why he had not undertaken more housing rehabilitation in New York. He argued that although he had done a lot of rehab in New Haven and Boston, the UDC lacked the financial and relocation tools of urban renewal, and the private market—owners and lenders—lacked the will to invest in rehabilitation within city limits; Logue testimony, October 21, 1975, NYSA, Series 11449, Sub-series 98, Box 9, 700–725.