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As cities choose entrepreneurial strategies to lure the mobile corporate service sector and its professional workforce, they also present more forbidding faces to the working class and poor. Scholars and activists have pointed to the passage of public conduct laws as evidence of how modern cities signal to the poor that their downtown cores are reserved for the privileged classes. Yet, even as scholars and advocates attest to the growing “meanness” of American cities, their reports have also routinely showcased cities that develop alternatives to criminalization. This chapter presents data from a historical case study of homeless politics in Philadelphia to shed light on the complex local dynamics undergirding or challenging the modern urban phenomena of “anti-homeless” legislation. Though a pro-development paradigm has slowly transformed Philadelphia since the early 1990s, the local business community has been consistently unsuccessful in its attempts to have new public conduct legislation passed or to have existing laws stringently enforced. Urban regime theory helps explain how a network of local homeless service provider and advocacy organizations has been able to use collaborative strategies to effectively shape the politics and policies of street regulation in the city.

The chapters in this section examine the exercise of power in two distinct policy arenas. Whereas Val Burris examines the interlocking networks among policy planning organizations, Clayton Peoples and Michael Gortari compare the effects of political action committee contributions on the voting behavior of elected officials in the U.S. and Canada.

J. Kenneth Benson is a professor Emeritus in the Department of Sociology, University of Missouri-Columbia. He continues to work on the development of a dialectical approach to the study of organizations, networks, and public policies. He also is working currently on religion and the professions. His work has been published in the Administrative Science Quarterly, The Sociological Quarterly, and other journals and edited volumes.