evening. Many other downtowns do not fare this well and have descended
into dereliction. This was not inevitable, but the consequence of a series
of political acts: taxpayer subsidization of the conversion of former forests
and farmland into suburbs, of cheap mortgages to buy the new housing,
and of new highways to get suburbanites to work. Such massive outlays of
public money did not extend to maintenance and repair of the old built
landscape. Rather, they accomplished the opposite. During the early s,
President Richard Nixon’s New Federalism introduced ‘‘general revenue
sharing’’ of treasury funds to be returned to states and localities, as op-
posed to direct grants targeted at central urban programs. The Housing
and Community Development Act of , meanwhile, permitted local offi-
cials to choose limited federal funding for projects that promised early,
reportable successes. As a result, mayors, councils, and housing officials
in Florida effectively wrote off at least thirteen neighborhoods as ‘‘too far
gone’’ for action; so large swaths of Jacksonville, Tampa, Miami (the largest
examples) were abandoned to permanent dereliction. The Ronald Reagan
administration persisted with its version of a similar funding system, while
cities watched their federal aid decline somewhat more than percent.
City officials, desperate to enlarge tax bases, usually spent reduced fed-
eral funds on the rebuilding of downtown business districts. Yet typically,
cleaned-up streets and office buildings usually begged for foot traffic and
renters, so everywhere (not just in the South), downtowns slid into blight.^19
Here is much of the explanation for the eerie silence of desertion in Jack-
son, Mississippi, on a Friday afternoon, when the poet Charles Simic came
from New Hampshire for a visit in .^20 Simic the literary man might have
expected to see the likes of the late writer Eudora Welty toddling about,
shopping or having an iced tea at a drugstore lunch counter. This was in-
deed Jackson’s downtown of old, but no more.
The roots of urban dereliction are nourished, still, in certified account-
ing practices, depreciation schedules, and tax law. Before the s, tax
law permitted depreciation of buildings (domestic and commercial) over a
long period, even if market values were rising (as they were). Amid the great
boom of babies and ’burbs, however, law and accounting practices effec-
tively reduced the period allowed for depreciation for tax purposes—in the
case of commercial buildings, from forty years to twenty, thereby encour-
aging the construction of new buildings and abandonment of older build-
ings as soon as depreciations were exhausted as tax benefits. The urban
geographers John Jakle and David Wilson suggest a revealing comparison
that surely reflects post–World War II American priorities: maintenance