Thursday, April 29, 2021

Wolf reviews Cohen's "Saving America's Cities"

Michael Allan Wolf, University of Florida Levin College of Law, has posted Between Jacob(s) and Moses: Ed Logue, Urban Redevelopment Lawyer, which appears in the Journal of Affordable Housing and Community Development Law:

In Saving America’s Cities: Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age, her thorough, fascinating, Bancroft Award-winning study of the life and work of Ed Logue, Harvard historian Lizabeth Cohen has presented a volume that should sit on every housing and community development lawyer’s bookshelf. I suggest nestling this volume between Jane Jacobs’s 1961 cri de coeur, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, and Robert Caro’s 1975 biographical masterpiece, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York. This review focuses on the legal aspect of Logue’s oeuvre. Those born in the 1960s and later have no first-hand knowledge of how significant federal dollars and tax expenditures, supplemented by ambitious state and private-sector participation, can dramatically increase the supply of affordable housing and redevelop, in positive and negative ways, large swaths of the urban landscape. For that reason, this review provides ample details concerning Logue’s successes and failures on the ground. 

--Dan Ernst