By any reasonable judgment, the current recession should have overturned any support for the practice known as neoliberalism, so named for its complete confidence in unfettered private markets, following the vision of Adam Smith. Instead, what appears to have been happening, is that the lack of funds in the public sector has encouraged cities to look more than ever to private partners to advance redevelopment aimed at improving their own fiscal status. Following the example of urban renewal in the 1960s, privately-driven projects tend to minimize the solution of social problems–of which there are growing numbers due to the recession–and emphasize greater return on enhanced real estate values. The New York Times has reported recently on two such examples of bold redevelopment, in Quincy, Massachusetts and in Buffalo. In the former instance, the city envisions raising most of its 50-acre center and replace it with $1.3 billion in new housing, backed by $289 million in pubic expenditures for new infrastructure.

In Buffalo, the chief agent is the University of Buffalo, which under its ambitious UB 2020 plan hopes to institute a $5 billion expansion, much of it downtown and with considerable public investment. Money for reinvestment is now available in the private, not the public sector. We’ve done this before, with many undesirable results, as my review of the recent literature on neoliberalism indicates. These efforts are worth watching.