Bonded metropolis : race, infrastructure, and the search for capital in San Francisco, 1900-1976
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Drawing on trade publications, the personal papers of bankers and municipal officials, credit ratings, annual reports, and bond ephemera, "Bonded Metropolis" offers the first historical account of the tangled trajectories of finance capitalism, race, and metropolitan redevelopment in twentieth century America. With San Francisco as its focal point, this dissertation shows how the municipal bond was at once a debt obligation used by municipal debtors to finance physical infrastructure, a cultural signifier with historically contingent meanings, and the basis of social relations between municipal debtors, bankers, sellers of financial information, and investors. The story begins in 1900, when Progressives repudiated an older logic of fiscal austerity to embrace municipal bonds as tools of progress. In so doing, the city opened itself up to events, processes, and relationships that impinged on the trajectory of public infrastructural development. I end in 1976, when complex structural changes and shattered social relations within the municipal bond market were largely reduced to a simplistic narrative of bad municipal debtors. As New York City's urban fiscal crisis reverberated outwards, an odd tandem of San Francisco liberal Democrats and fiscally conservative Republicans responded by imposing municipal retrenchment. The narrative arc moves from one form of municipal retrenchment to another, but in between I trace the reconstitution of the municipal bond market and situate the construction of public housing, transportation, parks, and schools within the context of rising borrowing costs. Ultimately, this dissertation demonstrates how municipal bonds were central to the production of urban space, how bonds held the potential to undo and remake urban inscriptions of racial inequality, and how the extension of municipal credit allowed geographically distant institutions and individuals to accumulate tax-exempt interest income. By beginning with the municipal bond, this dissertation confronts and reworks familiar narratives about twentieth century American capitalism, the co-creation of cities and suburbs, and layered forms of racial, spatial, and wealth inequality.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic; electronic resource; remote |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Publication date | 2016 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Associated with | Jenkins, Destin Keith |
|---|---|
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of History. |
| Primary advisor | Camarillo, Albert |
| Thesis advisor | Camarillo, Albert |
| Thesis advisor | Connolly, N. D. B |
| Thesis advisor | White, Richard, 1947- |
| Advisor | Connolly, N. D. B |
| Advisor | White, Richard, 1947- |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Destin Keith Jenkins. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of History. |
| Thesis | Thesis (Ph.D.)--Stanford University, 2016. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2016 by Destin Keith Jenkins
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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