ABSTRACT
If cities were to avoid further decline, their supporters would not only have to minimize the loss of households and businesses to surrounding suburbs but also overcome the forces within the city that were fueling out-migration. In these early postwar years, the two most prominent urban problems to be solved were slums and blight. Although these were recurring themes in the discourse, they became even more alarming when the predicted resurgence of the cities stalled. In fact, their intransigence was more and more apparent and came to be associated with a variety of other urban ills. Slums were fused with race and juvenile delinquency while blight was linked to traffic congestion and fiscal insolvency, among other interlocking themes. Consequently, balanced and cautiously hopeful assessments of the fate of cities became scarce.
