Across the world, business closures and plummeting tax revenues in the wake of Covid-19 have weakened the already fragile finances of municipal governments and the struggling citizens and communities who rely upon their services. Historians largely assume that local fiscal fragility is a recent phenomenon stemming from national trends of economic decline and taxpayer flight since the postwar era.

 

Such interpretations, however, overlook an older and more insidious source of local fiscal crises: destructive forms of economic growth promoted by local governments themselves.

 

Since the late nineteenth century, public subsidies towards speculative real-estate developments have not only failed to pay their own way, but have consistently undermined the well-being of marginalized communities, underwritten economic stratification, and entrenched the for-profit sector’s power over democratic governance.

 

By uncovering the intellectual history and political consequences of public finance theories and economic development practices, my scholarship challenges destructive assumptions equating private-sector wealth with public-sector health while revealing more sustainable and equitable sources of community wealth-creation in our own time.