Government relief to business has by no means been a monopoly of the federal government. States and localities have joined the parade in record numbers. Thus, the public was subjected to such spectacles as governors and prominent legislators from more than a dozen states making the pilgrimage to Michigan, hat (and wallet) in hand, to beg General Motors to locate its new assembly plant for Saturn automobiles in their jurisdiction (GM eventually chose Tennessee). Nowhere has government support for private business interests been more visible than in the subsidization of urban real estate development by municipalities. In the last chapter, we saw that the country's major urban centers have been undergoing a commercial revitalization in response tot he need of global corporations and their suppliers for a new physical environment of office towers, convention facilities, restaurants, and hotels within which to carry on their trade. The most formidable obstacle to the transformation of the urban environment into a space amenable to the needs of multinational corporations and their contractors, suppliers, and advisers (not to mention their employees, who are searching for safe and comfortable housing) was the social and physical structure of the existing city. Downtown areas were either crowded or abandoned- often both, at different times of the day. Sanitation was deteriorating. Electricity was not completely reliable. Pollution of the air and water was increasing. Good housing was becoming more scarce, even as the slums were spreading over more of the inner city. Municipal budgets were inadequate, and more and more cities faced potential bankruptcy. Making cities safe and physically suitable for the central activities of the multinational corporations became a major objective of what John Mollenkopf has aptly termed the 'growth coalitions' that began to emerge in one large American city after another during the 1970s. Real-estate developers, leading architectural firms, big banks and insurance companies, corporation executives, unions of construction workers, and a new breed of mayors who cast themselves as the true architects of the 'new city'- all worked together to raise the money and prepare the ground for the restructuring of the social and (as the city planners say) 'built' environment. This agenda was far too important to business to be held hostage to any ideological consistency. The watchword of the era may have been laissez-faire, but urban redevelopment was too big a matter to be conducted without government assistance. Thus, as they did for the military buildup, conservatives closed their eyes and jumped in to help business in a major way.
Bennett Harrison & Barry Bluestone, The Great U-Turn: Corporate Restructuring and the Polarizing of America. 1988.