The Ever-Changing American City seeks to help readers understand how the definition of what constitutes a city in the U.S. and who lives and works in them has changed markedly since 1945. The story of the postwar American city is not a simple tale of decline and rebirth. Nor is it a straightforward account of the struggle between the old urban core or central business district and the suburbs on the urban periphery, for both have had their economic ups and downs. In the decades that followed World War II, the cityscape was altered to better accommodate the automobile and the city gradually transformed from a place of production to a place of consumption. During the 1980s, city neighborhoods once occupied by migrants from the American South and immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe began to house newcomers from Asia, Africa, and Central and South America. The economic, environmental, and social issues now facing America cities from Portland, Maine to Portland, Oregon, will require them to continue the process of remaking or reinventing themselves.

Authored by prominent scholars, the twelve essays in this volume use the historical perspective to explore American urban housing policy as it unfolded from the late nineteenth through the twentieth centuries. Focusing on the enduring quest of policy makers to restore urban community, the essays examine such topics as the war against the slums, planned suburbs for workers, the rise of government-aided and built housing during the Great Depression, the impact of post-World War II renewal policies, and the retreat from public housing in the Nixon, Carter, and Reagan years.