An article in October 7th’s Washington Post detailed the Obama Administration’s new effort to revitalize America’s urban centers. While the rehabilitation of New York, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles and Chicago over the last two decades have led many to declare a national urban renaissance, most American cities, from Detroit to Schenectady, remain locked in a dead-end of crime, debt and deteriorating public services. To succeed, a national urban renaissance should be based on sound urban management, not just federal spending.
An urban renaissance must focus on sustainable spending. Our nation’s decaying cities are littered with downtown malls, civic centers and arenas. More often than not, these projects failed because the kinds of necessary improvements to civic life in education, healthcare, policing and basic services are ignored in favor of ‘get rich quick’ schemes. In a 2007 study of Massachusetts’ decaying cities, the Pioneer Institute stressed the need for fiscal discipline as a key element in attracting and maintaining outside investment. Whether it comes in the guise of tax incentives or block grants, unrestrained federal spending on our cities or our suburbs will only put off hard choices.
In this vein, conservatives must take a stand against one of the most alluring and least effective forms of profligate municipal spending: tax-increment financing. TIFs ostensibly support development in ‘blighted’ areas by offsetting private costs with a portion of local property taxes. But TIF-ing an area has been shown to do little in the way of permanently improving municipalities’ development prospects and can easily fall prey to the interests of developers and politicians while stifling community innovation. Ultimately, TIFs are a ‘pro-business’ guise for spending profligacy that avoids difficult choices about how municipalities should spend their limited resources.
Even ‘successful’ urban redevelopment strategies rarely touch the lives of the urban underclass. Urban development programs have been very good at attracting middle class people from outside the community, but less good at educating, protecting and advancing the disadvantaged people who already live in these cities. The Atlantic’s Hanna Rosin detailed the ways in which the highly-touted HOPE VI program succeeds in part by exporting a city’s poor, rather than by actually improving their own lives. The Pioneer study shows that even when depressed Massachusetts cities like Leominster or Springfield succeed in attracting large companies, those companies cannot afford to hire locals. Urban developers have much to say about attracting ‘new’ people to ‘revitalized districts but are more or less mum on what to do with current residents.
The Johnson Administration’s ambitious and well meaning programs fell apart on the shoals of unsustainability, incivility and rising crime. A national urban renaissance that does not focus, first and foremost on making cities safe, improving local education and promoting fiscal discipline is doomed to fail.
DFL // Oct 8, 2009 at 4:50 pm
In the end,a neighborhood or city is only as good as the people who live there. Much of Washington DC, New York and Boston is home to affluent, intelligent liberals and the parts of those cities where they dominate thrive. Detroit, Newark, Gary, East St. Louis and most neighborhoods in cities like Baltimore and Cleveland have few, if any, of those quality people and are probably unsalvageable.
ottovbvs // Oct 8, 2009 at 5:45 pm
dfl // Oct 8, 2009 at 4:50 pm
” and most neighborhoods in cities like Baltimore and Cleveland have few, if any, of those quality people and are probably unsalvageable.”
……..One wonders if you’ve ever been to Baltimore which over the last 30 years has undergone one of the greatest inner city revivals in the nation…….most neighborhoods in both downtown Baltimore and the outer inner city (The inner harbor, Fells Point, Bolton Hill, Federal Hill, Guildford (where I lived for several years), Roland Park, Homeland, Ruxton et all) are amongst some of the most delightful places you are going to find in any US city…….All this revival started with the great William Donald Schaeffer….a democrat (why is it that most of the great inner city revivals are led by Democrats?)……but his successors have kept up the pace…….they have their problems but Baltimore is a huge success story by any measure!!
LessThanExpert // Oct 8, 2009 at 7:54 pm
Baltimore seems an interesting case, although I have to admit that I haven’t studied it too much. Without overstating Baltimore’s recovery, because there are still very serious problems, Baltimore’s mayor focused on crime prevention and was extremely patient. The Inner Harbor, which has been a success, took 25 years to really take off. It was really the only mega-project that Baltimore has undertaken.
- CWB
Reason60 // Oct 8, 2009 at 10:48 pm
Urban Redevelopment programs, as the Charles Brackett points out, have a pretty poor track record.
However, one bright spot is that the decay and blight that took place in the cities of post WWII America was NOT a naturally occurrance of the marketplace. Instead, it was a direct result of the government creation of the Interstate freeway system, that made it suddenly easy to live in the suburbs and work in the city.
The recent renaissance of cities is the result of the cessation of the freeway system, and the expansion of drive times from urban cores to suburbs; when growth occurs, it cannot simply be accomodated in yet another belt of suburbs,so the natural makretplace reaction is to rehabilitate urban properties.
Cities go through natural cycles of growth, decay, and renovation. All the government needs to do is let the cycle work, focusing tax dollars on infrastructure that supports the city fabric, not abandon it.
DFL // Oct 9, 2009 at 8:26 am
otto lists the few neighborhoods in Baltimore that are civilized. Baltimore has not yet sunk to the state of Detroit. Much of the rest of “Charm City” is block upon block of slum, especially West Baltimore, nicknamed by my Baltimore friends as “The Wild West.” Pig Town in the south and Highlandtown to the east are in rapid decline. Johns Hopkins Hospital, an oasis in a stew of slums, has its own armed police force so that the sick may not be robbed, asssaulted or murdered on the way to the hospital. Baltimore is often at the top of any listing of murder and crime rates. Its city government is dysfunctional and its mayor is a crook who used gift cards that were given to the city for charitable purposes for her own personal purchases.
sinz54 // Oct 9, 2009 at 10:05 am
The automobile industry was Detroit’s only reason for existence. Without a vibrant American auto industry, Detroit simply doesn’t need to be a city of 900,000 people anymore. And with General Motors now a living corpse like Terri Schaivo, Detroit ain’t ever coming back.
I used to play the Detroit scenario on the SimCity computer game. The only winning strategy was to bulldoze most of it, turning most of it into attractive parkland–and keep a smaller but sustainable town in its place.
This is what people tend to forget: Cities may lose their original reason for existence. In which case it’s hopeless to try to save them, unless they can find a new reason. Pittsburgh lost the steel industry, but it was able to capitalize on tourism and a high-tech mecca around Carnegie-Mellon University.
Detroit has no such advantages. I say, get rid of it and relocate the people elsewhere.
balconesfault // Oct 9, 2009 at 2:12 pm
Detroit has no such advantages.
Well, Detroit has one great advantage – water, and existing infrastructure. Although bulldozing might actually be a good strategy.
Did SimCity include a module for “bring in the gays”?
sinz54 // Oct 10, 2009 at 3:29 pm
balconesfault:
Agreed.
But seaports are more important for heavy smokestack industry like autos than for high-tech. That’s probably one reason why Henry Ford located there.
BTW, check out Cities XL. It’s a new cool simulation game for the PC. Sorry, no gays in it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D8-Eys6f03s
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXSzmBISWk0&feature=related
Political Season // Oct 10, 2009 at 3:42 pm
@dfl “Detroit, Newark, Gary, East St. Louis and most neighborhoods in cities like Baltimore and Cleveland have few, if any, of those quality people and are probably unsalvageable.”
The above comment is exactly why the GOP and the conservative movement is perceived negatively by minority communities. I love the way this guy simply writes off thousands of Americans as “unworthy” and low quality people, people he or she does not know squat about other than they are most likely black and latino and live in cities which are in decline. Its just a perfect Kodak moment of conservative contempt.
While I can’t make a strong counter argument against the article’s point that TIFs can be abused, I actually think they are off base about their utility for urban redevelopment. The traditional use has been in downtown boondoggle projects. But if TIFS are used as tools in declining neighborhoods and used properly, they offer a way of generating the kind of capital needed to address infrastructure challenges that impede revitalization of an area or to be the catalyst funding corrects market failures in a way that helps the private sector come back and restart a properly functioning economic cycle.
The Republican Way to Urban Renewal - Hip Hop Republican // Oct 11, 2009 at 8:44 pm
[...] Charles W. Brackett a moderate Republican commentator and writer for NewMajority.com highlights some… According to Bucket, “any urban renaissance must focus on sustainable spending”. [...]