By Rob Gurwitt

At the recent U.S. Conference of Mayors meeting in Seattle, it was clear that prosperous times have mayors feeling pretty cocky. “It’s our day in the sun,” declared Wellington Webb, the mayor of Denver. “It’s hip living in the cities,” said Buddy Cianci, the mayor of Providence. “People want to be back.”

It’s true. Cities are once again in play. There’s money for condo developments, retail developments, office developments, entertainment complexes, you name it. Even in smaller cities, cities that don’t have the hot reputations that Denver, Seattle and Providence now enjoy, private money is interested. In New Haven, Connecticut, for instance, an old garment factory on the edge of downtown is being turned into condos, and the city’s planning director, Karyn Gilvarg, laments the fact that there aren’t more old buildings like it. “We get a lot of people coming through saying they want another one, and I have to say, ‘I’m sorry, that’s the last one,’ ” she reports.

I bring up New Haven because one reason it doesn’t have available older buildings — the sort that have helped fuel the renaissance of, say, downtown Providence or Denver’s Larimer Square — is that they got torn down, many of them as part of urban renewal projects in the 1950s and 1960s. And there is a lesson in this for city officials who feel like they’re “in the catbird seat,” as the New York Times recently characterized the current crop of mayors.

In 1960, Richard C. Lee, the energetic New Haven mayor who oversaw its urban renewal efforts four decades ago, also felt atop the urban world. “Dear Fellow Citizen,” he wrote in a confident letter to his constituents that year. “New Haven is well on its way toward being America’s first city without slums.” There were, to be sure, some shadows, and he noted them: “As I go around New Haven, I see the same things you see. Blight has begun to attack some of our finest middle-aged neighborhoods.” But Lee was confident he could create a “slumless city.” Instead, of course, the blight he’d noticed proved unstoppable.

Today, it’s not blight that mayors are seeing, but signs of prosperity; the market is returning to central cities. Odd as it may sound, though, prosperity could turn out to be as destructive of the fabric of cities as urban renewal was. Afraid of missing this wave, city leaders are casting their lot with grand development schemes — a huge commercial renewal project for Pittsburgh, an upscale retail retrofit for part of west Baltimore, a new waterfront for Port Chester, New York — that threaten to ignore everything cities learned over the past few decades about the value of incremental change, preserving the look and feel of the neighborhoods that make them unique, and being careful about predicting the future.

Leave aside the question of whether cities ought to be relying on big-box retail developments when the future of retailing is so murky. In their delight at the fact that people with money are once again paying attention to them, city leaders risk losing sight of the bedrock that their communities will always rest on: investment in schools and parks, support for working neighborhoods, the efficient delivery of services, respect for small-scale commerce. Ignore those and 30 years from now, when the market has moved on in unpredictable ways, we’ll look at those empty big boxes and wonder — just as we do when we look back at urban renewal — “What were they thinking?”

Rob Gurwitt is a staff correspondent for Governing.

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