Outsourcing Government: Boston and the Rise of Public–Private Partnerships

Though experimental during the 1960s, federal support of private nonprofit organizations eventually became a permanent feature of American governance over the ensuing decades, which has transformed the modern state and had a profound effect on urban neighborhoods and the people who lived in them.3 The federal funding that supported the Roxbury Multi-Service Center not only reflected a long tradition of public and private involvement in the lives of poor people in the United States but also marked a departure from earlier models with new levels of federal resources, monitoring, and regulation.4 My dissertation, Outsourcing Government: Boston and the Rise of Public–Private Partnerships, considers the reasons for and consequences of the growth of federal funding to local nonprofit organizations from its origins under urban renewal in the 1950s through President Clinton’s Empowerment Zone program of the 1990s.5 It traces the path of federal funding as it moved from initial passage in Congress to federal agencies and lower tiers of government, and into the coffers of nonprofit organizations and underwrote programming, salaries, and rents in urban neighborhoods. Not long thereafter, as activists and social reformers critiqued the bulldozing of residential neighborhoods and racialized displacement of families, renewal administrators and newly elected Boston Mayor John Collins began to speak of the “human side of renewal” as a broader effort to incorporate the social alongside the physical and economic.8 Chapter 1 considers how this new phase carried forward several administrative precedents from the earlier stages of renewal—including preferences for public–private partnerships, talk of “comprehensive” and “coordinated” planning, and grants for experimental programs—and positioned local nonprofit organizations as key agents in managing, mobilizing, and addressing urban poverty. While still reflective of the broader theories about poverty and its purported remedies, the decentralized channels through which funds flowed created new salaries, organizations, and capacity in neighborhoods across the city.9 ABCD and its grassroots affiliates then benefited from Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, thanks to a provision in the 1964 Economic Opportunity Act that expanded the experimental efforts of the early 1960s and for the first time enabled the federal government to make direct grants to private nonprofit organizations.10 Under this publicly funded, privately delivered s