In 1980 Pierre Clavel was finishing a manuscript on planning in the context of regional social movements in Wales and Appalachia, and had also been in touch with neighborhood organizers and their city hall supporters in several places - especially Cleveland, where Norman Krumholz had produced a "Cleveland Policy Planning Report" (1975), and Berkeley, where Eve Bach and others had done the remarkable The Cities' Wealth. Word had spread of the activism of Hartford's recently defeated Deputy Mayor Nick Carbone. Clavel was able to get Bach and Carbone to a session at the annual meetings of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning that fall. This article was the result - it describes city efforts to enact redistributive policies in the face of declining resources during the 1970s. Berkeley's Citizen Budget Review Commission is described against a background of rent control, attempted utilities takeover, and other actions and accomplishments proposed by the Berkeley Citizen Action coalition. Hartford's public developer initiatives to employ local residents and create lower cost housing are described alongside energy cost reduction efforts, food policy, and efforts to influence suburban jurisdictions to adopt fair housing reforms. Bach and Carbone each supplied major parts of the text. Clavel put them together and Social Policy published the result in their Winter 1982 issue.