ABSTRACT
The choices made by developers, business investors, and homebuyers all help determine patterns of urban growth and decline. Yet the “free market” does not tell the full urban story. This chapter details how government programs-including “hidden” urban policies-have shaped metropolitan America. The chapter also describes how manipulations by self-interested private actors impede the workings of a free market to produce urban problems that cannot be viewed solely as the “natural” results of free choice.
