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This chapter tells the story of what grew in the void left behind when the growth machine abandoned Williamsburg, Brooklyn—a neighborhood whose pre-World War II working-class, immigrant residents decamped for the suburbs during the 1950s—and what happened to its new, poorer denizens when the growth machine returned in the 1990s. It is a story that revolves around the activities of several community-based organizations devoted to seeking, creating, and protecting housing for poor local residents. It is also a story about how these organizations' ability to secure their constituents places to live has been facilitated and constrained by the particular manifestations of larger economic and political forces operating in the city.

This chapter explains urban policy in Hong Kong. It points out at the very beginning of the chapter that urban policy should not be approached simply as finding technical means for technical problems in urban areas. Urban policy's general domain has long expanded from physical concerns to social and community concerns. The chapter then observes that the “growth machine thesis” under the urban political economy approach provides the most useful and powerful framework in understanding urban policy in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) government. It also demonstrates how a network of powerful interest groups, all linked to the property market, has exerted a very strong influence on urban policies in Hong Kong. In order to check and balance the influence of these “rentiers,” and to secure the existence and representation of other values and interests in the urban policy of Hong Kong, two emerging social urban processes—community participation and the idea of sustainable development—should be enhanced.

Theories of the urban growth machine have long been a central analytical tool for contemporary research on urban governance. But in what sense are growth machines, in fact, “urban”? To what degree must “the city” serve as the spatial locus for growth machine strategies? To address such questions, this chapter critically evaluates the influential work of urban sociologists John Logan and Harvey Molotch on US growth machine dynamics. In contrast to an influential line of critique that reproaches these authors for their putative methodological localism, it is argued that their framework is, in fact, explicitly attuned to the role of interscalar politico-institutional relays in the construction of urban growth machines. These considerations lead to a dynamically multiscalar reading of the national institutional frameworks that have facilitated the formation of growth machines at the urban scale during the course of US territorial development. This analysis has broad methodological implications for the comparative-historical investigation of urban governance.

Community gardens have a complex relationship with urban growth and gentrification. This chapter draws on the history of Seattle’s P-Patch community gardens, which are well insulated from development pressure today, because dedicated resident-activists advocated for the gardens at critical times and won their preservation. Even while recognizing urban growth as a threat to their gardens, the P-Patch advocates opted for a pro-growth strategy, framing the gardens as good for a growing city. Indeed, the P-Patch gardens have fed Seattle’s image as a green and livable city, which has helped to attract high-income residents and increase property values. While the gardens are secure, and provide tangible benefits to many residents, low-income and other vulnerable residents face displacement from this green gentrification.

This chapter shows how neoliberal reforms changed community leaders’ public culture. The chapter first engages with urban growth machine theory, regime theory, and various field theories of action, employing game play as an analogy to clarify the relationship between federal policies and community leaders’ status competition. Much as actual game players experience rules as constitutive of a game’s organic flow, community leaders are chiefly focuses on competition with one another, even as this competition is structured by outside forces. Community leaders’ status competition was changed first by financial deregulation, which precipitated the 20th Century’s largest corporate merger movement. Corporations headquartered elsewhere acquired local businesses, thinning the ranks of traditional business and union leaders. Concurrently, federal bureaucracies responsible for social service and urban development funding switched from discretionary grants to small, competitive grants, which require community leaders to appeal to multiple outsiders to realize their local goals. Via a historical investigation of several 1980s-era crises, the chapter shows that these challenges coincided with the emergence of big tent economic development organizations, which include multiple local stakeholders. In their new context, community leaders who built flexible partnerships to appeal strategically to outside funders solved local problems and rose to public prominence.

Chapter 2 traces the changing nature of urban governance and participation between the 1940s and the present. It argues that much of HOPE VI variation is rooted in a city’s experience with earlier efforts at slum clearance, urban renewal, and central-city highways. In those cities where past backlashes against perceived excesses in land taking and displacement in residential areas led to lasting citywide movements to prevent this from happening again, there seems to be much greater protection for the poorest citizens under HOPE VI. Instead of more narrowly constructed urban regimes or growth machines focused in public-private partnerships, broader coalitions develop. Using the metaphor of constellations, the chapter identifies four types of poverty governance: the Big Developer, Publica Major, Nonprofitus, and Plebs. Each of these encompasses diverse players in development initiatives, but corresponds, respectively, to a polestar located in the private sector, public sector, not-for-profit sector, or community sector.

An overview of Chicago’s first century as a city, tracing the expansion of Chicago’s real estate businesses, boosters, and suburbs, this chapter also analyzes literary reactions to Chicago’s early suburbanization, especially Henry Fuller’s With the Procession (1895) and James Farrell’s Studs Lonigan trilogy (1932–35), lamenting the pressures of Chicago’s growth machine.