ATLANTA'S BIRACIAL COALITION IN TRANSITION
Looking at Atlanta over time, one can see a process of change by accretion. Though a long-standing biracial coalition remains at the center of the city's governing arrangements, Atlanta 's regime shows signs of declining synergy. The business sector is less heavily focused on the central city than in the past, and the Black middle class is less closely linked to the Black lower class than it was in the early days of the biracial coalition. Four benchmark cases indicate that partners in the coalition are not related in such a way as to enable the city to take up such issues as school reform and a human-investment strategy effectively. While an agenda addressing poverty and social problems faces major obstacles in Atlanta as elsewhere, other cities have overcome significant barriers to construct such an agenda. Atlanta's leadership displays less creativity than in the past, allowing the city to become a captive of history and the confining character of past practices.
KEYWORDS: urban regime, race, agenda, biracial coalition, governing coalition, political change
Hosting the Summer Olympics in 1996, Atlanta marked a half-century of governance by its biracial coalition. This is a remarkable run of political stability, but a close look at Atlanta in the 1990's reveals evidence of change. Below we use four benchmark events to suggest that the cohesion of Atlanta's biracially based regime has diminished. The coalition displays a weak capacity to take on significant problems, particularly those associated with poverty, a low-performance school system, and much needed investment in human capital.
Looking at Atlanta against the backdrop of earlier decades, we can see regime evolution in process. There should be little surprise in this. With the larger world undergoing change, we can expect the internal character of a governing coalition also to change. As new issues and challenges arise, the capacity of a regime to respond depends partly on the nature of those issues and what kind of challenge they pose. For this reason, drastic reconstitution (a form of realignment or punctuated equilibrium) sometimes occurs. However, despite periods of stress and strain, Atlanta's regime has not undergone such a reconstitution. The composition of the governing coalition remains much the same, but the relationship among the members has changed in subtle but significant ways. Since 1946, when the present governing coalition took shape, change has occurred mainly by accretion. However, as we show below, accretion is not a trivial form of change; it has altered the character of Atlanta's biracial coalition to an important degree.
Consider Atlanta at the end of World War II. It was similar to other deep south cities, and the mayor, William B. Hartsfield, fiercely opposed racial change. However, change was in the air. The white primary in Georgia was about to fall, and, in pursuit of economic growth, the major downtown businesses in Atlanta were willing to embrace modernization, even if it meant racial change. The Black community was poised to mobilize its electoral power as soon as the barriers to enfranchisement came down, and in 1946 a Federal District Court ended Georgia's white primary. The subsequent voter registration drive, making African Americans one-quarter of the Atlanta electorate, cut across class lines, as all segments of the Black community felt a common stake in opposing the Jim Crow system.
Thus both African Americans and white business élites had strong reasons to involve themselves in the governance of the city, but, then, so did those leaders in the white community who appealed to a constituency of lower SES whites, small-business owners, and other tradition-minded whites. The white-business/Black community coalition was not a pre-determined outcome, as the experience of such cities as Birmingham, Alabama, attests. It took political vision to put together a coalition around the slogan, "the city too busy to hate." Those six words capsuled an agenda that combined economic growth and the gradual ending of Jim Crow.
Agendas, it should be emphasized, consists of more than catchy slogans. They have substantive policy content, covering not only broad aims but also concrete and detailed programs of action. Atlanta's governing coalition pursued a highly complex body of actions, sometimes negotiated in lengthy and tension-ridden sessions. Multiple agents and organizations were involved, and two of the key ones were the Atlanta Urban League and the Central Atlanta Association (later Central Atlanta Progress – the organization of businesses in the central business district). Both were capable of designing and negotiating programs of action with great specificity.
The Atlanta experience suggests that a governing arrangement such as the city's biracial coalition is not an open-ended capacity to tackle any and every problem on the scene. It is a governing arrangement constructed to act on an identifiable agenda. To be sustained the agenda needs to be broad enough to bring together a substantial coalition, to be concrete enough to guide specific actions, and to be flexible enough to accommodate a range of particular issues as they arise. To construct such an agenda requires both vision and capable staffing.
Turn now to Atlanta in the 1990's. At this point, African Americans were no longer a swing-vote minority, but a clear voting majority. City Hall had been Black-led since 1974, and, outwardly at least, Jim Crow was largely gone – gone to the point that the Black middle-class now had an economic fate only indirectly tied to African Americans of lesser income. Thus the foundation for political involvement has changed within the Black community. While middle-class African Americans play a highly visible role in the affairs of the city, lower-strata voting has tailed off significantly (Affigne 1997).
Growth and globalization have changed the business sector as well. Home-grown leaders of the stature of Coca-Cola's Robert Woodruff no longer populate the civic landscape. As the 20th century gives way to the 21st, economic growth has spread into far-reaching suburbs, and business leaders now give considerable attention to regional issues and the role that the state can play in such issues. Motivation for business to be involved in the central city has been diminished by the enlarged stage on which economic activity now occurs.
Though both economic and demographic changes have had an impact, they are not the total story. New problems have emerged, but they have yet to be incorporated into a prorgam of action. Without an appropriate agenda to rally around, it is hard to find the resources and the political will to address these emergent problems. In some ways the Atlanta of today has become a captive of the city's past. After a brief look at the approach we have taken, we will turn to four benchmark events to see what light they cast on the contemporary Atlanta situation, particularly the biracial coalition's failure to take up persisting challenges.
" Atlanta has a major affliction of self-delusion." (Jimmy Carter)
A note on approach
Historical sociologists, such as Philip Abrams (1982) and Barrington Moore (Smith 1983), see change as a contingent process. They are concerned with the flow of history, not as a path that is economically or socially determined, but as a series of points at which decisive actions are taken, thereby structuring the future. History, they argue, moves not in accord with a set of "iron laws," but in a contingent manner. Structures persist or modify in line with choices made, though, in any given situation, some courses of action are more readily pursued than others. Some choices are easily made, and perhaps are made without much forethought. Others may involve risk, singular effort, and sacrifice, and therefore are choices made only when extraordinary considerations come into play. Generally continuity is easier than change, but, because that path is not automatic, we need to understand the process of change.
Events take shape when extraordinary considerations lead to a course of action with significant future consequences. Actors weigh considerations and make critical choices. Abrams talks about events as marking "decisive conjunctions of action and structure" (1982, p. 199). They mark points at which important structures are either continued or modified in important ways. The formation of Atlanta's biracial coalition in 1946 was the founding action for the current version of Atlanta's regime (as an "event" it involved replacing an earlier body of arrangements, that is, a governing structure), and subsequent actions (as events) have served to maintain the coalition.
This process is what Abrams terms "structuring," and it is closely akin to what Anthony Giddens calls "structuration" (1984). No founding event is forever. Such an event sets a context for future actions, but future actions determine whether a set of governing arrangements (the regime) is maintained, modified, or thoroughly replaced. In very broad features, Atlanta's 1946 structure of governance (the biracial coalition) remains in place. Even though significant modifications have taken shape, no punctuation of the equilibrium has occurred. Indeed, one could say that the hosting of the 1996 Summer Olympics was a maintaining event. Yet, by examination of less salient events, we can refine our understanding of Atlanta's regime and see that significant evolution is occurring.
Barrington Moore reminds us that history contains roads not taken -- there are what he terms "suppressed historical alternatives" that are also part of the picture (Smith 1983, pp. 128-130). Moore's idea closely resembles "nondecisions" in the work of Bachrach and Baratz (1970). In our work, we lean away from using the word "suppressed" to describe all instances of paths not chosen. "Suppressed" implies the presence of a superordinate or controlling force ("power over"). We prefer to allow for the possibility that alternatives not pursued may have been "neglected." Indeed, we believe that "neglect" may be more widespread than "suppression," and an analysis of "neglect" is therefore essential to understanding the process of change. The political landscape is populated with significant failures to come together around possibilities. These failures of "power to," we believe, provide significant insight into the continuing evolution of governance by Atlanta's biracial coalition. With this in mind, we turn now to four benchmark events.
Benchmark Preview
Atlanta's biracial coalition enjoyed a high profile in planning and managing the 1996 Summer Olympics, and that event provided ample indication that the biracial coalition is still a force in Atlanta. Putting together and acting on the city's successful Olympic bid, however, is a much different challenge from such matters as addressing the city's poverty problem and developing a human-investment strategy. In this section we examine four cases of city action to see how the biracial coalition responds to social problems and the needs of its nonaffluent population.
First we look at education, a matter of long-standing concern. Then we turn to three cases related in various ways, albeit in the main indirectly, to the 1996 Summer Olympics. One is the Atlanta Project (known widely as TAP), initiated by former president Jimmy Carter in 1991. Though very much a product of Carter's social conscience (Brinkley 1998, pp. 356-363), TAP gained support from the fact that upcoming Summer Games would put a world spotlight on the city. TAP provided a means for showing that Atlanta cared for its poor people. Another initiative was the Renaissance Program, intended to follow through on the Olympics with a broad effort to address various challenges and promote "a post-Olympics renaissance for the city" (Saporta 3-24-98). The final case is housing reform, particularly reshaping public housing, and improving lower-income neighborhoods. In its origins, this initiative was linked closely with the development of facilities for the Olympics but also involves Atlanta's designation as an Empowerment Zone.
Collectively the four cases show that social needs and problems are widely recognized, but Atlanta's biracial coalition has demonstrated little capacity to put together concrete and sustainable responses to them. Moreover, neither city hall nor the business sector seems to learn from past experience; a pattern of ineffectual initiatives repeats itself.
School reform: a missed opportunity
In 1993, Atlanta faced a critical opportunity in school reform. A Nation At Risk had been published a decade earlier, and subsequently the national call for education reform had been made and remade in several forums. The state of Georgia had initiated its Quality Basic Education Act and had taken other initiatives. Yet none of this determined what the local response would be. Despite weakly performing schools and widespread worry about the situation, Atlanta did not come together around a comprehensive and sustained move to reform its educational system. The city shows what a neglected opportunity looks like, not because various sectors of the city were indifferent, but because diffuse concerns and scattered activities never generated a community synergy.
In 1993, however, Atlanta seemed ripe for a thoroughgoing reform effort. Schools were performing at an abysmal level, with test scores lower even than those in some of Georgia's rural counties. Moreover, the longer Atlanta students were in the education system, the worse they performed; high school scores were even more dismal than scores in the elementary grades. The drop out rate was high, at an estimated 30 percent. Even with per-pupil expenditures higher in Atlanta than in many of the surrounding suburbs, enrollment in city schools had gone down at an astonishing rate. From 1975 to 1993 enrollment halved, declining from 119,000 to 60,000.
Atlanta's elected school board was scandal ridden and rife with conflict, leading one observer to characterize it as "the most criticized and ridiculed" body in the city government (Holmes 1993). One member had been removed for channeling funds at questionable payment levels to favored contractors, and another board member was under fire for accepting funds from the board's highly paid ($300,000 per annum) attorney. The board was sharply split along racial lines, and personal disputes within and across racial lines heightened the conflict level. Civility was at a low level, and an argument between a member of the board of education and the school superintendent nearly turned violent. Though school board proceedings were televised and therefore viewed by the public, questions of education policy took a back seat to issues of who was in charge of what, contracts, jobs, and school employee compensation packages.
With school board elections upcoming, the time seemed right for coalition- building around a fresh start. If Atlanta were to launch a broad move to reform its schools, 1993 would seem to have been the time to do so.
Obstacles stood in the way, however. Racial tension was not confined to the school board, but extended throughout the education arena and beyond. Further, 20 years earlier under the auspices of a Federal District Court Judge hearing Atlanta's school desegregation suit, a biracial group signed an agreement known as the Atlanta Compromise. Though the signatories were biracial, the agreement had the result of eroding the ground on which the interaction between the races could occur around issues of education.
In this earlier era of jurisprudence, when racial balance was a consideration, Atlanta, with a school system already heavily African American, posed the possibility that litigation could turn down the path of a metropolitan solution. White business leaders were eager to avoid that turn of events for fear that it would torpedo an ongoing effort to gain suburban support for a regional mass transit system. Leaders in the African American community were unsure that they could achieve a workable agreement centered on racial balance, and some had doubts that racial balance should be the top education priority in any case. With that background, a biracial committee reached an agreement to forego the busing of students for racial balance and instead to alter the racial balance of power in the administrative control of the school system. An African American would be named to replace the white superintendent, who was stepping down, and Black representation would be increased throughout the upper ranks of school administration. Informally, Black and white leaders understood the arrangement to be one of shifting control of the schools from white hands to Black.
Subsequently business involvement in education virtually disappeared. In 1993, two decades after the Atlanta compromise, a member of the school board observed: "During the time I've been with the board of education [16 years], until about six months ago, there was never any business leader who appeared before the board on any issue" (from interview notes of carol Pierannunzi).
Nevertheless, for 1993, business put aside its practice of disengagement and created a campaign organization, EDUPAC, to support a new majority on the nine-member school board. In an environment of rising opposition, four members of the board chose not to seek reelection. A biracial coalition came together in another organization, Erase the Board, and it was seeking a completely new school board. Erase the Board was headed by the president of Concerned Black Clergy, and it enjoyed biracial support spanning a diverse set of groups: the Atlanta Council of PTA's (a racially mixed but majority black organization), 100 Black Men, Atlanta Parents and Public Linked to Education (Apple Corps, a small but well organized group headed by white women professionals), the education division of Jimmy Carter's Atlanta Project (a group with strong business connections), the teachers' union, and the Council of In-Town Neighborhoods and Schools (another racially mixed group).
Whereas Erase the Board sought a complete ousting of incumbents, EDUPAC supported three incumbents, and those three were reelected. But two other incumbents were defeated, and the post-election board of education had six new members. The school superintendent also resigned, and the stage was set for a new era in Atlanta's education politics. For a time, racial division had taken a back seat to a move for change.
With business having a renewed interest in education, the Chamber of Commerce formed a Committee on Public Education, as an organization to bridge the gap between business and schools. Moreover, the Chamber of Commerce undertook a study that sounded a supportive note for the public schools, and the chamber engaged in self-reproach over lack of business involvement in education. The study touched on the issue of workforce development and criticized business reliance on the graduates of suburban schools to meet labor needs.
Already in place at that time was the Atlanta Partnership of Business and Education, concerned with such matters as adopt-a-school programs and teacher-of-the-year awards. In addition, like most cities, at this time, Atlanta had a number of advocacy groups for children as well as organizations concerned with various aspects of youth development. Overall there was no shortage of actors interested in education and issues of children and youth.
Yet, some of the staff members in organizations concerned with education were new to Atlanta's civic life and, in interviews conducted at that time, displayed little knowledge of the past history of school politics in Atlanta or how to navigate its treacherous waters. This was a sign that major players from the business sector were uninvolved, and the issue was left in the hands of players of lesser standing. Thus, while diffuse concerns about education provide useful raw material, in and of themselves they do not generate an impulse to organize. Someone has to see and act on a big picture of community-wide purpose and cooperation around that purpose. In Atlanta that did not happen. School reform proved to be a road not taken.
With schools desperately in need of attention, with the education issue prominent in public discussion, and with a diverse set of players coming together to elect a new school board, and with an opening to bring in a new school superintendent, Atlanta's biracial coalition could have come together around improving its education system. It did not. Interest in school reform existed, but it was scattered among several organizations, each of which continued to pursue its particular agenda. No one came forward to summon the disparate players to join efforts and form an encompassing coalition with a comprehensive program of action.
Perhaps it is not surprising that, during the election, even though their aims coincided closely, there were two separate campaign organizations. When the election was over, the two organizations folded and made no effort to join in a common cause of school reform. Instead, potential partners went their separate ways.
The business sector had started 1993 off with a resurgent interest in education and an encouraging Chamber of Commerce study, and the Committee on Public Education held promise of an institutionalized commitment. Once the election was over, however, these broad concerns faded, and the business once again narrowed its focus to the conventional issues of containing costs, un-businesslike practices such as tenure (subsequently eliminated by state legislation), and excessive bureaucracy. The new school board and new superintendent embraced a kindred outlook and soon occupied themselves with economy measures such as school closings and various financial matters like the system's underfunded pension plan. Such issues as alternative uses for closed schools, underutilized space for pre-kindergarten programs, and services for families and children went unpursued.
Among advocacy and social service organizations no move toward a comprehensive approach emerged. In some cases, the staff of such agencies, what Floyd Hunter (1953) called "under-structure professionals" seemed, as one observer noted, to spend much of their time and energy in meetings with other professionals. In the eyes of some, the most effective groups in the city are the smaller and often unfinanced groups like 100 Black Men of Atlanta and Apple Corps. With limited resources, these organizations have an impact through a sustained but narrow focus, and they cannot muster a wider approach.
Perhaps as an unintended legacy of the Atlanta Compromise, education has proved to be highly resistant to civic mobilization. During the 1990's, the school system had four different superintendents (the fourth continues in office at this writing), and many of them have shown little inclination to court business involvement. Moreover, since the 1993 Chamber of Commerce study mentioned above, business has mainly been critical of Atlanta schools and their management practices.
To complicate matters further, the city and its schools have come under sharp attack by political representatives from the surrounding and overwhelmingly white suburbs. It is not surprising, then, that in the city of Atlanta barriers of race and class stand as major obstacles to putting together a coalition behind school reform.
The depth of distrust can be seen in reactions to a 1999 proposal to convert Grady High School to charter status. Grady has a magnet program and is one of the few high schools in the city to have a racially mixed enrollment. As discussion proceeded, it became clear that Black parents, particularly those whose children were not part of the magnet program, strongly opposed change and distrusted the motives of those backing the charter move. In a series of meetings, these parents registered the following objections:
In general in Atlanta's non-affluent neighborhoods, anxieties about white dominance undermine support for change. There is more worry about what might be lost than about what might be gained. Distrust at various levels and across lines of race and class gives rise to Atlanta's weak form of civic capacity, particularly in matters of social policy and human capital (cf. Stone, Henig, Jones, and Pierannunzi, forthcoming). With distrust widespread, actors tend to carve out small bits of turf and defend them. In the education arena, coalitions are ad hoc and short-lived. What should be noted, however, is how little effort is devoted to altering the situation. Broad-vision leadership is in short supply. Perhaps still operating in the shadow of the Atlanta Compromise, business ventures little. Activity lies largely in the hands of "under-structure" personnel, and they carry little credibility as "movers and shakers." As the Grady High School experience illustrates, unless parents and other community-based actors can be engaged as supporters, resistance to reform may run deep. The striking feature of the Atlanta scene is the scarcity of people either seeking to enlist élites to come together on the education issue or striving to overcome the distrust among the masses. Despite the city's long history of biracial governance, education as an issue remains tellingly disconnected from economic development, general worries about the quality of life, or other concerns that might power a reform-minded coalition willing and able to tackle school reform. At this writing, school reform remains an elusive goal in Atlanta, and the board of education has reverted to its earlier pattern of bickering and interpersonal strife.
The Atlanta Project
"We're proud of getting the Olympics, we're proud of the Braves, Atlanta's skyline and that sort of thing. But underneath, Atlanta's rotten in many ways and this needs to be addressed frankly." (Jimmy Carter)
In the years following his presidency, Jimmy Carter established himself in Atlanta as an elder statesman, with much of his energy focused on worldwide initiatives. But in the early 1990s he came to be more interested in the conditions of the poor in and around the city. He was uniquely placed to head a broad-based initiative in that he was somewhat of an outsider in the city's politics, and yet Carter was a high-profile consensus builder with easy access to economic and political power as well as the press.
Working from these strengths, Carter focused civic attention on the severity of Atlanta's poverty problem, persuaded business leaders particularly to move beyond a very modest "do good" effort called Atlanta's Promise, and embark on the Atlanta Project (TAP) -- a broad antipoverty project with a strong community-building aim. In launching his project, Carter did not seek to enlist government as a major partner. Instead, he "pointedly disavowed depending on taxpayers' money -- the funding would come from private foundations and the business community" (Brinkley 1998, pp. 356-7). As Carter saw it, government's role was to reduce red tape and enable people to use resources more effectively. Private funding and volunteer workers were to provide resources and a touted principle was to "give people the resources to solve their own problems, neighborhood by neighborhood" (Brinkley 1998, p. 357).
With Carter's leadership, TAP was able to bring together a wide variety of potentially capable actors in the city. It was by all accounts a sweeping initiative, encompassing economic, social, and educational goals. Business leaders signed onto the project with corporate sponsorships, donations of employee volunteers, and in-kind resources. Dan Sweat, a former director of Central Atlanta Progress (the city's premier downtown business group), was appointed as the first director of the Atlanta Project, and he quickly moved to mobilize business involvement at an unprecedented level. University personnel were dedicated to the project by local colleges, and nonprofit groups also expressed interest in a more coordinated effort that the Atlanta Project might provide. Particularly with Jimmy Carter as the prime backer, media and public attention focused heavily on the project. Lacking, however, was enthusiastic support within the African American community. Some of the city's clergy feared that the emphasis on volunteers and private funding was a cover for reducing the government's role (Brinkley 1998, p. 360). Others saw TAP as a top-down operation, run by people little interested in working with the city's Black clergy (Pomerantz 9-15-1996).
TAP's structure was designed to elicit neighborhood involvement and planning in the outcomes of the project. Twenty clusters were designated around public high schools in the city and the region. Each cluster was to have a corporate and university partner and a local cluster coordinator who would work together to create programs specific to the needs of the local community. A central Collaborative Center would coordinate the projects, seek funding, evaluate progress, and provide resources as needed to the clusters. TAP itself was intended as a process. At its founding, TAP administrators were hopeful that the project would empower the neighborhoods to the point that the structure of TAP itself would no longer be necessary. A five-year plan was envisioned in which community activists would slowly take over the needs of their own neighborhoods and the administrative structure would be dissolved. The goals of the project were wide ranging, but four principal criteria were established for purposes of evaluation:
The Atlanta Project suffered, however, from many of the problems that plagued previous iterations of coalition building around human capital initiatives in the past. Also there was no attempt to understand the political or social context in which TAP was to operate. Although a huge ethnographic study was undertaken, ignored was the institutional history of cooperation of these groups and/or of groups of citizens within the city -- despite the fact that numerous baseline indicators were developed to assess the quality of life in the neighborhoods and the level of operation of extant groups and organizations. Potential competition and conflict between and among clusters, citizen groups and organizations were not anticipated
Some collaborators with TAP saw it as a process and a goal in and of itself. Internal documents underscored the need for coalition; "the goal of empowerment presumes that the decision-making processes within TAP will be inclusive" (Carter Collaboration Center 1994). Building the coalition was a goal, if not the only measure of the success of the project. However, TAP set a difficult task for itself, in part by its sweeping agenda. In order to achieve its aims, business elites would have to forge alliances on social issues with the poorest neighborhoods of the city. Members of the coalition would be racially, socially, politically and economically diverse. Key staff members within TAP understood problems associated with creating a consensus in the city but, despite the rhetoric of partnership, chose to pursue quick and visible results over a longer term process of building collaboration. The project's initial director, Dan Sweat, said that if Carter "had tried to sit back and organize [TAP] in the usual way, and bring everybody to the table and make sure they were all in their right places … after five years you would still be discussing and negotiating who was going to be able to get what, and none of the things that have happened would have happened" (quoted in Pomerantz -- 9-15-96).
General awareness of TAP was high and positive, but assessments by neighborhood activists and community leaders (including neighborhood planning unit chairs, nonprofit administrators, corporate advisors) were less positive than the public as a whole, and in most cases, negative (Carter Collaboration Center 1994). From TAP's inception, communication among players within TAP was problem-ridden. The relationships between corporate advisors and community leaders were particularly difficult, as was noted in a survey of TAP participants. Serious conflict arose between these actors in many of the clusters around which services were organized (Carter Collaboration Center 1995a, p 60). There was no consensus on the goals of TAP—no single vision—nor clear priorities. The ideals of the mission statement had "not been incorporated well into the training of personnel and/or into their management. As a result considerable energy and resources [were]… expended in activities which are not linked…to the goals of the project." (Carter Collaboration Center 1995b, p. 6). The lack of issue identification is also noted in the executive summary of TAP's evaluation: "Bringing organizations together without an issue focus is not only unproductive, it also has the negative effect of raising expectations of collaboration with the resultant criticism of TAP when the collaboration fails to take place" (Carter Collaboration Center 1995b, p.9; see also Blake 9-15-96).
Although there were some successes in the goal of collaboration, many nonprofit groups felt left out of the process. In the words of TAP's self-evaluation, "the tendency has been to develop an initiative internally and then to consult with external organizations, rather than to work with external organizations from the outset in the development of initiatives" (Carter Collaboration Center 1995a). Moreover, stories appeared in the press indicating that some nonprofit groups believed that TAP "was squeezing them out of the loop for corporate and foundation money," and they saw advice to work through TAP as a loss of autonomy (Scott 10-17-92; see also McDevitt 9-22-92; and Vejnoska 10-9-94). Furthermore, the clusters did not coordinate with each other. And, again connections to the original goals of the program were either not sustained or never created, as is illustrated by the following evaluation by internal documents: "Most of the initiatives implemented by the clusters do not address the goals of the project in a systematic and long term manner" (Carter Collaboration Center 199b, p. 25). An example of a project implemented by TAP, but which did not build community empowerment nor decision making, was TAP's most widely publicized event in which volunteers set out to immunize every child in the city against common childhood diseases. Rosalind Carter headed the door-to-door volunteers who canvassed the city. Although the event was in itself a success, it did not connect well to community empowerment goals, and had, in fact, not been a priority concern for neighborhood residents. In this instance, as in many others, community resident reaction to the immunization program was that a service had been provided or that outside decision makers had determined what was best for their communities.
However there were some successes. Unlike previous initiatives, public attention was focused on the project and many citizens, groups and business were involved in the process. Yet, although TAP did well at recruitment of volunteers and recruitment of corporate sponsors, it was not very successful in placing volunteers in any effective manner. The hotline for volunteers was badly managed and many of those who called to volunteer were never contacted again or not placed. By June 1994 there were 14,152 volunteers and 516 corporate and civic group donors, numbers that are at least adequate to make significant community change. But a later released section of the overall evaluation points out that many of the corporate partners (which were linked to specific clusters) acted on their own without going through the cluster itself (Carter Collaboration Center 1994, p. 59). The report notes that "direct action by the corporate partners appears to be in conflict with TAP's strategy of implementing empowerment through the cluster organization. By acting outside the cluster organization or under the thin disguise of cluster approval, it might be argued that corporations are only providing lip service to the idea of empowerment or are actually undermining progress toward empowerment" (Carter Collaboration Center 1995b). There is evidence that there were serious conflicts between cluster coordinators and corporate partners in at least 5 of the 20 clusters. University partners were even worse than the corporate partners. Most clusters reported that they had virtually no contact with their university partners (Carter Collaboration Center 1995b).. One interview reported that TAP was the "most squandered good-will" that had ever been witnessed in the city (Carol Pierannunzi interview notes).
In the end the project proved too diffuse to sustain -- too many initiatives, too vague a focus, and too few resources for the scope of what was attempted. Though the 34 million dollars raised is a significant amount, only about one third of that was in cash; most of it was in-kind contributions, including the time of corporate staff. All things considered, it is a small war chest for waging war against poverty in a major metropolitan area (the project was region-wide and not confined to the city). As one observer put it, "TAP was spread too thin," and he noted that "once the novelty wore off the volunteer base began to shrink" (Brinkley 1998, p. 363).
Organizers discontinued many of the services after an inititial five-year commitment, and many corporations did not sign on for what proved to be a much scaled-back Phase II. The formal evaluation of the project calls the cluster organization a "failed experiment" and recommends "immediate action to redress the lack of understanding of the project by key participants." It also states that "progress…toward its goals appears modest relative to the amount of effort and money expended." (citation) One comment in the final evaluation noted that there was virtually no success in sustaining or expanding existing social services. At this writing there are still some remnants of TAP in operation at Georgia State University (www.cartercenter.org/ Atlanta.html ) and some programs in the more successful clusters persist, but there is little to remind observers of TAP itself. As the overall project came to a de facto close, an editorial bemoaned the absence of a final report about what worked and what didn't, about lessons learned, about poverty and how to address it (Wooten 9-18-96).
Looking back on TAP, almost everyone agrees that it was a disappointment. Though Jimmy Carter is credited with genuine concerns and good intentions, unmet expectations left a residue of pessimism and disillusionment. Reflecting on the project, an editorial writer suggested that in today's world maybe it is impossible "to convert groups of people into communities capable of making coherent decisions or articualting any solutions" (Wooten 9-18-96). Certainly the project taught lessons about "the inherent limits of private charity" (Kurylo 9-15-96).
TAP was not an effort by the city's biracial coalition. It was cast as an initiative to draw on volunteers and private money. Local government was not a partner, and key organizations in the African American community, such as Concerned Black Clergy, never became an integral part of the process (Pomerantz 9-15-96). Especially telling are the comments by Dan Sweat, quoted above. Sweat was a key figure in the city's civic and political life, with involvement dating back to the mayoralty of Ivan Allen. He saw a move to bring "everyone to the table," not as a means by which consensus could be built around a mission or a clear set of program priorities, but as an invitation to a negotiating process which was sure to slow action and maybe block it altogether. All in all, we can see that what had emerged as Atlanta's operating slogan, "let's make a deal," has little to offer as facilitation in forming an anti-poverty strategy.
The Renaissance Program
The Renaissance Program had all the markings of the biracial coalition in full operation. Yet the reality is quite different. Renaissance involved a show of civic potential, it identified broad goals, and it even generated a consultant's report, but it culminated in no program of action. Ostensibly making an effort to build momentum from the hosting of the Olympics, Mayor Campbell in 1996, with strong business backing, assembled a blue-ribbon commission. However, once the commission issued its report and the mayor secured re-election, Renaissance soon disappeared from the civic scene. The initiative shows how city leaders fail to achieve goals despite opportunity to do so.
The Renaissance Program was touted by Mayor Campbell as a "whole new agenda" for the city at a time when the Olympics had defined an economic course for the city. In an interview published in June 1996, Campbell cited the two main goals of the Renaissance Program as economic development and neighborhood development. At that time the Program appeared to be a commission of well known business leaders but the only information available to describe it was a three-page document, short on specifics and long on political rhetoric. When asked who began the initiative, Campbell stated that it was a collaborative effort of his staff, although "in essence it is my plan." The interviewer, a commentator for the Atlanta Journal/Constitution, described Campbell as angry when pressed for details (Campbell 6-4-96).
Barely a month later, the goals had shifted and multiplied. Included now in the agenda were government, business, and academic partnerships, financing and legislative options to encourage economic development, economic development strategies, neighborhood revitalization, education and regional issues. The group agreed to meet every six weeks for a year, and was scheduled to complete its work in sync with the November 1997 mayoral election (Saporta, 7/2/96).
By the spring of 1997 the goal of the project had again been restated. Although some of the same rhetoric continued in a report produced by a consultant for the Renaissance Program, the new main focus was a much more specific objective--to increase the middle-income population of the city by 60,000 residents. To achieve this end, housing and education received more attention. The economic development proponents continued to work their agenda, and the Program was split into four task forces, now dealing with such myriad issues and long-term problems that it is difficult to note any clear direction for the group. In fact, the goals of the group included in one session the highly unlikely annexation of suburban communities to increase the proportion of middle income residents (Saporta 4-23-97). General goals, such as increasing public safety and improving public education, received repeated attention (Saporta, 5-27-97). At the same time, despite endorsement of improved education as a goal, the commission proved unresponsive to a plea to expand resources put into pre-school programs and, for teenagers not bound for college, school-to-work programs (Turner 9-23-97). Instead of boosting opportunity for the poor, the commission emphasized the need to increase the number of middle-income residents in the city (Matthews 4-24-97; Saporta 7-17-97; 3-24-98; and 9-28-98).
Although some early reports of the Renaissance initiative were optimistic and the group itself was composed of powerful economic and political leaders, there were few, if any, successful outcomes. After a year of meetings, Campbell no longer took claim over the program as "his plan" but instead began talking of "moving to implementation" of an unstated and still forming plan (Saporta, 6-25-97) and finally referring to the report of the Renaissance program as "a guide…consistent with our goals and objectives" (Turner 7/17/97). Campbell referred the report of the Renaissance Program to the Atlanta Development Agency, formed earlier that year to address concerns over bureaucratic obstacles to economic development initiatives in the city. After 17 months of work and the involvement of most major stakeholders in the city, when the report was turned over to the Atlanta Development Agency, its officials immediately and publicly asked the mayor what to do with the group's recommendations. "What we will," was Campbell's ambiguous response (Turner, 7/17/97).
A month later Campbell was quoted as saying that "there never have been any boundaries on this group" (Saporta 8/27/97). And indeed there were apparently none as the group seemed to broaden its objectives with each press release, each grander and less likely to achieve success than the preceding set. In what apparently was its final iteration in the spring of 1998, the Renaissance Program extended to include regional issues such as federal air quality and urban sprawl.
To date it is difficult to assess the implementation of the recommendations of the Renaissance Program. Two years after the commission concluded its work, upon inquiry no city officials appeared to have information on or even knowledge of the program. Roberto Goizueta, chairman of Coca-Cola and founder of the business group working on the program, died and no successor voice emerged. Outside of the political blessings bestowed during a re-election campaign, the mayor achieved little from the program. And from all accounts he made no concerted effort to mobilize for long-term action.
Although the lofty goals of the group were consensual, the Renaissance Program illustrates how flimsy coalition building is in Atlanta. The Renaissance commission (headed by the mayor) and the groups that supported and produced its numerous reports and recommendations seemed to assume that they would be listened to and that community follow-through would ensue. The group never coalesced around any concrete agenda, never found a method for inclusion of a variety of opinions, and neglected specifics in favor of unrealistic and long-term goals without heed to resources or personnel for action. For example, the addition of the improvement of public education as a goal without including any educators is typical of the manner in which problems were addressed. The Renaissance Program is a classic of Atlanta's lost opportunities. Despite the fact that leaders of business and government met for the better part of two years, during a period of strong economic growth, no specific agenda could be agreed upon, no actions were taken to address problems, and no residue of success remains. The Renaissance Program set no stage for future initiatives; instead, it added to a legacy of pessimism about future action. Its report acknowledged "a lack of consensus among the city's political and business leaders regarding Atlanta's future direction," and it highlighted as a problem "an environment of cynicism and distrust among each of the city's major constituencies" (Saporta (3-24-98).
Housing reform and neighborhood improvment
Unlike the reform initiatives of public education, the Atlanta Project, or the Renaissance Program, housing reform in Atlanta is widely regarded as having produced substantial and lasting results. The full reality is more complicated than a simple verdict of success, but housing is a noteworthy area of activity. Buoyed in part by the 1996 Olympics, a state funded enterprise zone, and a federally funded empowerment zone, the Atlanta Housing Authority (AHA) has made some significant changes in public housing in the city. In the process, AHA has moved from being on the "troubled list" of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Devevelopment (HUD) to being a national model of how to bring about change (Towns 2-15-98; Dickerson 3-3-99). Recent AHA policy has reduced the number of public housing units in favor of a smaller, mixed-use projects. Since 1994 the total number of public housing units in the city has dropped from 14,413 to 10,474. Much of this loss can be attributed to turning housing stock over to private ownership, demolishing units, and changing some housing projects to mixed use (AHA Workforce Fact Sheet).
The table below indicates change in the five projects noted as successes by the AHA.
| Table 1. Number of Housing Units Available at Select AHA Projects |
| Centennial Place (formerly Techwood Homes) |
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| Village at East Lake (formerly East Lake Meadows) |
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| Castleburry Hill (formerly John Hope Homes) |
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| Magnolia Park (formerly John Eagan Homes) |
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| Carver Homes |
| *Estimate derived from percentage of low-income occupancy rates published by AHA |
Although the projects illustrated above clearly reflect a loss in low-income housing availability, AHA maintains that there has been an increase in the number of Section 8 vouchers issued, thereby making up for some of the loss. AHA also defends its policy by noting that in 1994 much of the AHA housing stock was badly in need of renovation. Estimates for total renovation of existing AHA housing reached $300 million, which was not available to the city at that time (note that this is nine times the amount raised by TAP). AHA has undertaken some unconventional financial arrangements to achieve its goals. State and federal housing funds are matched with private investment in the areas designated for new mixed-use housing. Funds are then spent, not necessarily on housing per se, but on the communities in which housing is to be made available. For example, in East Lake Meadows (renamed the Village at East Lake) private ventures financed an up-scale golf course and country club, neighborhood leaders created a charter school (the first to be opened in the city) and local residents organized a neighborhood group. City funds were used to rebuild a YMCA in the area. Most of what had been East Lake Meadows was demolished and a smaller mixed-use neighborhood replaced it. AHA's $33 million investment in East Lake was supplemented by state, federal and private funds to total $80 million in housing and neighborhood renovations.
Another success story noted by AHA is Centennial Place, formerly Techwood Homes, the oldest public housing project in the United States. Within view of the 1996 Olympic Village, Techwood was tapped for renovation earlier than most of the other projects under AHA oversight. It now boasts a $165 million renovation including a new school, community center, hotel, and corporate facility. Moreover, Centennial Place is the home of several pilot workforce projects undertaken by AHA. Able-bodied residents must enroll in job training programs in order to remain in public housing at Centennial Place.
Though East Lake and Centennial Place are not representative of all 41 housing projects overseen by AHA, they illustrate the pattern of success in the small number of projects that have undergone significant change. They represent a change in policy described by Renee Glover, AHA's executive director, as seeking to become "the best provider of affordable housing in the country," not "the best public housing agency" (quoted in Towns 2-15-98). The executive director, a former corporate attorney, made it a point to say that housing for the jobless and homeless are better handled by organizations oriented to those with "special needs" (Towns 2-15-98).
The shift away from housing those most in need to mixed-income projects serves a significant social purpose in reducing concentrations of the poor. It is also consistent with the business goal of housing for middle-income people. Being dependent on business investment (as well as a huge infusion of federal funds), the reshaped projects share a notable set of characteristics. They are all located on relatively expensive land with easy access to the central business district, they are located in the central part of the city at or near sites of the 1996 Olympic venues, and they are generally within the jurisdiction of the federal Empowerment Zone, discussed in more detail below.
Communities located at the fringes of the city have not been included. A large majority of the city's public housing residents are not affected by these dramatic changes, and it remains to be seen how far the reshaping of public housing will be extended.
Many of Atlanta's lower-income citizens are, of course, not in AHA projects, but in neighborhoods subject to forces varying from disinvestment to gentrification. For them, HUD's Empowerment Zone program offered a potentially significant lift, and also a channel through which resources could magnify the effect of public funds. Yet, if AHA's mixed income projects represent an example of effective action by the city's governing coalition, Atlanta's Empowerment Zone has strong kinship with school reform, the Atlanta Project, and the Renaissance Program. The Empowerment Zone, a federally funded 250 million dollar effort at neighborhood improvement, including housing, industrial, business and community revitalization illustrates once again a pattern of miscommunication, lack of a common agenda, and ultimate loss of opportunity that has characterized so many social policy initiatives in the city.
Prior to the 1996 Olympics, the city applied for Empowerment Zone funds through HUD. The program is intended to make communities more self-sufficient economically by improving housing, commercial, and industrial opportunities in a defined area. As the date for grant submission neared, numerous actors were taking part in the discussions, but little had been put on paper.
In a recent interview, a senior official reported that there was little coordination of the competing interests that wished to be part of the zone. Neighborhood infighting became intense as boundaries for the zone were determined. The lack of central coordination by the city proved to be a weakness. Part of the problem was the defining of criteria and goals of the empowerment zone itself. By definition, the empowerment zone is an area designated for growth from within. That is the boundaries of the zone would define an area that was to strive to become self-sufficient, treating economic problems in this area as distinct from the rest of the city. One official noted that attempted isolation of one sector of the city for economic growth was troublesome from the start and in part contributed to the competition among neighborhoods. Public hearings were contentious, often with neighborhood activists claiming representation without any formal representative process. The city's neighborhood planning units (NPUs), which are created by the city charter and integral to the planning process, were soon overshadowed by individuals seeking to make themselves heard and have their particular agenda incorporated into the grant.
Even more startling has been the notable lack of input from area businesses.
Interviews reveal that only neighborhood small businesses were represented at the meetings, but larger businesses, the chamber of commerce, and Central Atlanta Progress were not players in the matter. With $250 million at stake, the absence of the business elite was both surprising and, eventually, disabling. When questioned about why business leaders did not seek input in the Empowerment Zone process, one official noted that there were several potential reasons. First, given the late date and the lack of preparedness by the city, there were few who believed that the city would be successful in the application process. Second, most of the Empowerment Zone (designated in the southern and eastern section of the city, roughly forming a J shape around the central business district) was outside the area that was of special concern to the city's business elite. Finally the lack of communication and coordination of the process was itself an obstacle and barrier to participation by business elites. For large businesses, entry into the debate about what would be included in the grant application would have been time consuming and subject to dispute, with little potential tangible outcome.
It is clear that the upcoming Olympics was salient in the award of the Empowerment Zone to the city. The grant focused heavily on the potential for growth presented by the Olympics. But the application was not clear on the formal structure of governance of the zone, nor was it specific on criteria for projects to be funded within the zone. Mismanagement characterized the early stages of implementation (Charles 6-14-98). High-priced offices were rented, and high-salaried positions filled with little or no positive outcomes. The first administrator was fired following media disclosure of mismanaged funds and poor administration. A year into the program passed without impact on the communities within the zone.
The Empowerment Zone governance structure, so loosely defined by the application, was reconsidered and improvements in the quality of funded projects and efficiency of operation began under the leadership of Joseph Reid, the new administrator. However, the initiative shows no sign of involvement by a vigorous biracial coalition. The virtual absence of corporate business in the launching of the Empowerment Zone is testimony to the narrowness of the business sector's agenda, a lack of business confidence in most city-run operations, and therefore the limited reach of Atlanta's biracial coalition in the governance of the city.
What we see overall in the area of housing reform and neighborhood improvement is that the biracial coalition operates on occasion, but there is no comprehensive effort to address housing and neighborhood conditions and mobilize varied resources for their improvement. Instead, there are piecemeal efforts, a few of which elicit public-private partnership but most of which are either city run (and sometimes questionably managed) or left mainly to small church and humanitarian groups to operate as best they can with limited resources.
These four benchmark events occurred in a context in which considerable tension existed between business and a Black-led City hall. Business, especially through the voice of the Atlanta Constitution and Journal, has played an oversight role and, on occasion, has offered harsh judgments on the performance of public officials. In that performance, extensive conflicts of interest and ill-documented expenses have gotten wide coverage. Yet the coalition has not come apart, and at one stage a biracial group called on the newspaper to ease off its criticism of the mayor. It is clear that many Black officials question the motives behind white criticisms, and distrust is fed by open hostility toward the city by representatives from the predominantly white suburbs around Atlanta. For its part, Atlanta business appears to have limited confidence in the public sector, perhaps fearing that extensive government money and activity create too much political autonomy. The convergence of various circumstances leaves the biracial coalition in place, but, as our benchmarks indicate, with limited capacity to act. What was once a highly effective coalition has now lost cohesion and, as a result, has only modest synergy between its principal elements. Nevertheless, coalition members cling to what has worked in the past and take what pride they can in the successes they experience.
It would be easy to attribute the diminished cohesion of Atlanta's governing coalition to a changed basis for participation. The positions of both the African American community and the business sector have altered in important ways.
With greater access to business and professional opportunities, Atlanta's black middle-class continues to have a strong motivation for political involvement, but it has less incentive to pursue joint political mobilization with those who have many fewer opportunities. The challenges facing the city's middle are now quite different from those facing the lower classes (Stone and Perannunzi 1997).
As a consequence, though the legacy of a Jim Crow past continues to make appeals to racial solidarity effective, these appeals do not in themselves mobilize the African American community around such matters as reform for a weakly performing school system, expanded early childhood programs, or workforce development of a kind that would enlarge opportunity for the city's poverty population. It is not surprising, then, that voting among the lower classes is now quite low. Missing are programs that could give lower-income people a direct stake in the public sector and that could counteract alienation stemming from a long standing position of marginality. The Atlanta Project showed white voluntarism to be ineffective as a means for credibly expanding lower-class opportunities. It does not follow that Black-led public agencies would face the same fate. The possibility has not been tested by, for example, an ambitious program of human-capital investment.
With increasing regional economic growth, white business executives have a less concentrated stake in the central city than was the case at the end of World War II and many years thereafter. Even so, they have a continuing stake, though their concern with reducing Black poverty is sporadic at best, and the Renaissance Program in particular showed little concern for that issue. Still, the existence of the Atlanta Project indicates a degree of concern with poverty, and it is easy to see that regional economic well-being might be affected by the health and image of the metropolitan area's signature city.
The foundation for political engagement is thus complex, as one would expect for a large city. There are motives that could be tapped to revitalize the city's regime around a revised agenda. As the experiences of selected other cities show, it is not inevitable that an urban community be inattentive to poverty, ineffective schools and an under-developed workforce. Several places have constructed agendas around human capital issues (Clarke and Gaile 1998; Stone, Henig, Jones and Pierannunzi; forthcoming).
Atlanta, however, has forces at work that militate against the kind of vision needed for an updated agenda. One weakness is the high level of fragmentation in the local government sector. In Georgia, health and social services are county, not city, responsibilities. Moreover, Atlanta spills into two counties, but is commensurate with neither. In addition, the school district, though coincident with city boundaries, is an independent taxing authority. And the Atlanta Compromise of 1973 may serve to accentuate the autonomy of the school system.
Further complicating the picture is the two-term limit on holding the office of mayor. Particularly given the fragmentation of local government, mayors have little encouragement to take a long-term view and plan accordingly. American politics generally is candidate-oriented, and the constraints surrounding Atlanta's city hall reinforce that tendency. Further, lacking the kind of career professionals at the upper level of local government that are present in Europe or in council-manager cities in the U.S., Atlanta mayors are surrounded by administrators who strongly share a candidate-orientation.
Again unlike many localities, particularly European ones, Atlanta has weak political parties and labor unions. Business is largely unchallenged in the city's civic life (for a contrast with the U.K., see Haughton and While 1999). The philanthropic sector is small and business-dominated, consequently providing little support for an advocacy community that could research and frame an alternative agenda.
Yet, experiences in other cities suggest that Atlanta's low-synergy regime is not inevitable. Take Boston for example. Despite a prolonged and bitter struggle over school desegregation, that city has put together a substantial agenda of school reform backed by a wide coalition, including business, labor, higher education, school administrators, and community groups and including an impressive network of organizations (Portz, Stein, and Jones 1999).
El Paso is another example. Notwithstanding a city/county divide on top of a Hispanic/Anglo divide and three separate school districts, El Paso has created a Collaborative for Academic Excellence (Navarro and Natalico 1999). It includes the Greater El Paso Chamber of Commerce, the El Paso Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, an affiliate of the Industrial Areas Foundation, the city government, the county government, the regional education office of the state, the three school districts, the community college, and the University of Texas El Paso. The city has thus overcome its fragmentation, and it has held two "summit meetings" as well as developed a program for "building a cadre of community leaders and parents who are willing to support educational renewal for the long-term" (Navarro and Natalico 1999, p. 14).
Though Atlanta's present pattern of incentives does not automatically favor a tight and synergistic governing coalition, neither does it make such a coalition impossible. What is missing in Atlanta that is present in selected other cities is the vision to overcome the centrifugal forces of an urban community. Human agency can, and in selected other cities has, constructed arrangements that create synergy instead of capitulating to fragmentation (cf. Sewell 1992). After all, regime arrangements structure as well as are structured by motives for various segments of the community to become engaged..
Atlanta has always held a special place in the study of urban politics, and it continues to do so. Over the past few decades, a regime built around "the city too busy to hate" evolved into a regime resting on "let's make a deal." The latter slogan and what it represents holds the city's biracial coalition together, but it has little capacity to bring the city's resources together to meet problems of poverty, ineffective schools, and an under-developed workforce. Atlanta thus enables us to examine the relationships between regime and agendas.
A formulation within urban regime theory is that the policy or problem-solving capacity of a governing arrangement depends on the composition of the governing coalition and the relations among the members of this coalition, including the resources they bring to the task of governance. However, by itself this standard regime formulation is too static to capture all that is important. The Atlanta experience shows that a governing coalition does not emerge in a vacuum. The framing of an agenda is a key part of putting together a governing coalition (Stone forthcoming). The agenda has to be credible to have a mobilizing effect, but mobilization also imbues an agenda with credibility. A two-way process is at work.
Once in place, an agenda, as events in Atlanta show, can change by accretion and evolve into a modified foundation for governing arrangements. In Atlanta, the shift from the "the city too busy to hate" to "let's make a deal" is such an evolution. As the agenda evolves, coalition relationships also evolve. Through evolution, the coalition can gain or lose synergy. Evolution can enhance a capacity to respond to new issues or weaken that capacity, depending, of course, on the issues. Atlanta's regime has shown only a weak capacity to respond to such issues as poverty, ineffective schools, and an under-developed workforce even though a changing global economy might give such issues heightened urgency.
Looking at a governing coalition from a dynamic perspective, we can see that members may provide more or fewer resources, depending on how they see the agenda. "Let's make a deal" neither builds trust in other coalition members nor encourages a long-term vision. A goal of academic excellence tied to workforce development, as in the case of El Paso, encourages both a broad and a long-term view of what is at stake. Moreover, the El Paso experience points to the possibility of "enacted change" in the governing coalition itself. Although officials in established institutions formed the El Paso Collaborative for Academic Excellence, the coalition has taken as one of its tasks building its grassroots side. That potentially provides the Collaborative with additional resources for strengthening and sustaining its school reform effort.
It may well be that Atlanta's regime today is hampered by its past. In the early days of the dis-establishment of the Jim Crow system, the biracial coalition relied heavily on behind-the-scenes negotiations in order to minimze the likelihood of backlash. It was a form of conflict management. Settlements thus had something of a private character to them. "Backroom deals" are, of course, not peculiar to Atlanta. Still, they are sufficiently prominent in the history of Atlanta's biracial coalition to weaken the public character of governance. The sheer informality in the coalition relationship may make it difficult to keep a focus on broad, public purposes and, at the same time, may make it easy for narrow or even private aims to hold sway. Against a background of candidate-oriented politics and a highly fragmented structure of local government, personal commitments and ties may simply preempt the space that could be devoted to building support for expansive policy initiatives. It may be that over time the Atlanta business elite's heavy reliance on selective incentives has underscored the usefulness of personal connections in such a way that larger public purposes find an unfavorable civic climate.
In Regime Politics, Clarence Stone argues that one way of thinking about regimes is "the coordination of institutional capacities in the task of governance" (1989, p. 235). Effective cooperation typically has an informal dimension to it, but, if the informality lacks a clear public goal, as in contemporary ("let's make a deal") Atlanta, then institutional capacity gains little. The contrasting situation in El Paso highlights the point. There the city's leaders have created an organized entity to coordinate efforts in pursuit of school improvement. Though the El Paso Collaborative has no formal authority to govern, it brings together the community's major institutions around an explicit policy goal in a way that does enhance the capacity to govern. Thus far Atlanta lacks a parallel move to coordinate institutional capacities on behalf of such issues as education, workforce development, and poverty alleviation. Either fragmentation holds sway, as in education, or "coordination" has a narrow base, as in housing reform. And Jimmy Carter's TAP largely left government out of the picture.
Looking at Atlanta more than ten years after the publication of Regime Politics, we are struck by the fact that continuity in the composition of the governing coalition has not precluded significant change. If one looked only at the hosting of the Summer Olympics, not much would appear to be different. It is social policy issues that expose weaknesses in the capacity to govern. They also put selective material incentives in a different light.
"Side payments," whether material or not, hold an important place in most governing arrangements (March, 1962), but Atlanta's evolving experience points to a caution. To the extent that "side payments" become an end in themselves, a community may find its capacity to govern greatly narrowed. That is a weakness of machine politics, and it now appears to be a weakness of Atlanta's biracial coalition. If cohesion rests on selective incentives alone, then only those activities that generate such incentives receive sustained attention. Effective social policy initiatives require more than selective incentives, and in contemporary Atlanta "more" appears to be missing.
Dan Sweat's comments about the Atlanta Project suggest that the goal of ameliorating poverty is highly vulnerable to a struggle over particular benefits. The pattern is not unusual, but it does not always hold either. Consider Atlanta's experience in the 1960s when the city peacefully desegregated its schools and led Georgia away from the policy of massive resistance. In Atlanta, events like that are driven by what writer Tom Wolfe calls a "macro decision" (1998, p. 603), a decision based on what is considered good for the city as understood by the biracial coalition. The coalition's current agenda does not accord combatting poverty or the development of a human-investment strategy that status. Why?
Wolfe's political analysis is worth considering. He describes Atlanta, not as a place where there is extensive cross-racial understanding, but as a city resting on a deep racial fault line. A major political challenge, then, is how to maintain racial peace. As Wolfe sees it, Atlanta is a place where the "big firms" play a key role. As expressed by the character of the Black mayor in the novel: "the bigger they are, the more willing they are -- they're willing to do us big favors just for sake of . . . oh, keeping everything smooth, warm, congenial, and well oiled with the black power structure. It's sort of like 'paying tribute'" (1998, p. 527).
Wolfe's term "tribute" is quite revealing. Though in the novel the term is used by a character who is African American, the viewpoint reflected in the term is almost certainly that of the city's white business elite. A "tribute" is a side-payment, not an integral part of the process of governance.
Historical perspective puts Wolfe's depiction in a fuller light. In the early days of the biracial coalition, "tribute" included measures (sometimes reluctantly agreed to by business leaders) that moved toward ending the Jim Crow system. Even if a measure was a token step, such as integrating the municipal golf course, it was still a move on behalf of a large policy objective. Over time, steps taken reluctantly by whites nevertheless became part of how both partners came to see the city; "the city too busy to hate" became a symbol of pride.
Since the end of Jim Crow as a body of custom, backed by law in the southern states (its residue, of course, lives on), "tribute" has consisted mainly of opening up business and professional opportunities to a Black middle class ready to seize them. This form of "tribute" shades imperceptibly into selective material incentives. While serving an important purpose of economic integration, it also rewards individuals. Members of the middle class are positioned to seize opportunities in a way that members of lower classes are not. The system of social stratification underinvests in the lower class to a degree that can be overcome only by collective measures, but collective measures are hard to put together and sustain. Hence, as organizing items on an agenda, they are susceptible to displacement by "tribute" in the less demanding form of middle-class opportunities. At the same time, because even middle-class opportunities are heavily dependent on social networks and connections, they are best kept open in a racially divided city by the leverage of public authority. Even so, that authority is wielded more easily on behalf of individuals than of collectivities. For that reason, the line between selective incentives and collective policy goals is a thin one, and it is not clear that the current form of "tribute" anything more than that. Though Carter's TAP early on may have held promise of more, "tribute" now appears to be little more than a necessary cost of doing business. Mayor Campbell's handling of the Renaissance Program suggests that it is not an integral part of the process of governance.
Putting all of this together, we can see how the Atlanta regime has changed and why, as presently constituted, it is inhospitable to collective measures on behalf of the city's nonaffluent citizens. Until the business sector is receptive to a human-investment strategy as essential for "the good of the city" and until the city's African American leadership sees a need for a more inclusive program of action, the regime will be guided heavily by "side payments." Only a recast agenda can put the coalition members in a relationship likely to support and sustain antipoverty and human-investment initiatives. A recasting has occurred in several cities, but at this writing Atlanta is not one of them.
An examination of the Atlanta experience through the 1990's suggests several general conclusions:
Chester Barnard reminds us that "among those who cooperate the things that are seen are moved by the things unseen" (1968, p. 284). If the rewards for involvement in governance are to be more than a scattering of particular benefits, then some set of actors must exercise human agency and develop a vision of how significant problems can be solved by bringing elements of the community together. Atlanta's experience suggests that without a renewed vision, governing arrangements are likely to undergo declining effectiveness. Thus acts of creativity in framing an agenda and holding a coalition together are at the heart of the evolving politics of urban regimes. Atlanta shows that creativity in this process at one period is no guarantee of creativity at a later time.
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