Urban Crisis

The expression urban crisis functions as shorthand for a host of issues—social, economic, political—that [Page 823]appeared to reach a critical point simultaneously in many United States cities in the mid-1960s. Long-term trends in the mid-20th century included factory closings and the shift of population, offices, and retail businesses to suburban areas, which depleted cities' tax bases and left inadequate resources for servicing aging infrastructure and for responding to the social problems engendered by unemployment and poverty. However, the term urban crisis often conjures images of the violent racial disturbances that shook cities across the nation in the 1960s. It was, in fact, the riots that gave rise to the rhetoric of urban crisis: Rather than simply declining, U.S. cities suddenly threatened to explode. The urban crisis must also be understood as a matter of changing perceptions—the growth of a pessimistic, negative attitude toward cities—as much as a story of the real conditions in them.

Riots were usually spontaneous acts of grassroots retaliation against police brutality toward African Americans, fueled by broader racial injustice. Between 1964 and 1968, more than 200 separate incidents of collective violence occurred in cities across the United States, resulting in hundreds of deaths and thousands of burned homes and businesses. Broadcast images of these conflagrations and confrontations with police and National Guard became indelible images of the American city. Former HUD Secretary Robert Wood noted that, after the outbreak of rioting, journalists began frequently to describe urban affairs as “crises.”

Viewed primarily as a racial conflict, the urban crisis could be seen to continue through the desegregation and busing battles of the 1970s in such cities as New York and Boston, and even into the 1992 Los Angeles riots triggered by the Rodney King police brutality trial. At the same time, scholars, including Thomas Sugrue in 1996, locate the origins of the urban crisis as far back as the 1940s, when whites in the urban North responded violently to the arrival of southern black migrants into their workplaces and neighborhoods. But such strife was not new, for ethnic, racial, and labor conflicts had a long history in 19th-century American cities.