Public–Private Partnerships

Historical Evolution

If partnerships are considered in the broadest sense as public-private collaborations, their origins can be traced to the close relations between political and economic elites in the expanding nineteenth-century city. Where political machines dominated, local government utility franchises and building contracts attracted investors who were sources of campaign contributions, jobs, and tax revenues. Nonmachine cities, too, had their public-private partnerships, as evidenced in various city planning and municipal reform organizations.

The origins of contemporary partnerships, whether defined as project-focused, long-term, or legally chartered collaborations, are generally traced to federal urban renewal policies (1954-1974). The urban renewal program required an institutionalized local capacity to plan and implement redevelopment projects in order to receive federal grants and loans. Because many cities lacked that capacity, this requirement prompted new government-business alliances. In some cities, business organizations and committees took the lead in policy planning and project execution; the local government's role was its exercise of eminent domain and project funding. In other cities, local urban redevelopment authorities, quasi-independent public agencies overseen by appointed, public- private boards of directors, were in charge. Yet even here, business organizations typically determined the parameters of downtown revitalization plans.

Subsequent federal government programs have continued to foster an expanding array of public- private partnerships for urban revitalization. President Jimmy Carter's 1978 national urban policy emphasized that governments alone could not solve urban problems and needed the active assistance of the for-profit and nonprofit sectors. The federal Community Development Block Grant (1974-) and, more especially, the Urban Development Action Grant (1977-1989) encouraged local governments to leverage public monies through incentives such as subsidized loans and land writedowns as well as infrastructure spending to stimulate private industrial and commercial investment, create jobs, and generate new tax revenues. The Reagan administration's enterprise zones and the Clinton administration's empowerment zones also required alliances among governments, firms, and local community-based organizations to attract jobs and investment to poor urban neighborhoods.

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