President Jimmy Carter’s Urban Policy

Abstract

On March 21, 1977, President Jimmy Carter directed six federal cabinet heads to form an urban and regional policy working group to devise the nation’s first urban policy. The policy-making process ended over a year later, during which federal department officials, public interest groups, big city mayors, and state governors jousted with each other over the focus and extent of the urban policy. The attempt yielded proposals for federally supported regional land-use planning, regional tax-base sharing, neighborhood empowerment, an urban development bank, and “urban impact analysis” of federally supported projects. This article chronicles the formulation of the urban policy, its initiatives, and its eventual implementation, and questions whether a national urban policy for the United States can ever be developed.