Since the demise of urban renewal in the early 1970s, the politics of large-scale public investment in and around major American cities has received little scholarly attention. In MEGA-PROJECTS, Alan Altshuler and David Luberoff analyze the unprecedented wave of large-scale (mega-) public investments that occurred in American cities during the 1950s and 1960s; the social upheavals they triggered, which derailed large numbers of projects during the late 1960s and early 1970s; and the political impulses that have shaped a new generation of urban mega-projects in the decades since. They also...

Over the past two decades Americans have become increasingly skeptical about the benefits of community growth and hostile to new taxes--while continuing to demand improvements in local services. One response to this tension has been a burgeoning movement to raise public revenue by regulating growth. In this timely book, the authors explain that most growing localities now require private developers to finance public improvements as a condition for receiving permits to build. These permit conditions, known as "exactions," are most commonly used to ensure that infrastructure capacity will be...