Taking back the inner city: A review of Recent Proposals

Rebuilding Inner-City Communities: A New Approach to the Nation’s Urban Crisis (New York: A Statement of the Research and Policy Committee of the Committee for Economic Development, 1995), 70 pp., funded by the Ford Foundation and 16 other foundations and corporations. The CED is a nonprofit, nonpartisan, and “nonpolitical” organization of some 250 blue-ribbon corporate leaders and educators that researches and proposes policies to support, among other things, economic growth, high employment, reasonably stable prices, and “greater and more equal opportunity for every citizen.” In its own words, “CED believes that by enabling business leaders to demonstrate constructively their concern for the general welfare, it is helping business to earn and maintain the national and community respect essential to the successful functioning of the free enterprise capitalist system."Google Scholar

Rebuilding, ch. 2.Google Scholar

NIMBY = Not In My Backyard!Google Scholar

The list is from John Kasarda, “Inner City Concentrated Poverty and Neighborhood Distress: 1970-1990,”Housing Policy Debate 3 (1993), 253–302, who designates a Census tract distressed when it is considerably, i.e., one standard deviation above, the national average on four indicators—the proportion of poor households, single women with children, welfare cases, and unemployed men.Google Scholar

Rebuilding, p. 3.Google Scholar

Michael E. Porter, ’The Competitive Advantage of the Inner City,”Harvard Business Review (May-June, 1995): 55-71.Google Scholar

David Rusk,Cities without Suburbs (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, for the Woodrow Wilson Center, 1993), 146 pp.Google Scholar

Ian J. Bromley et al., “Agenda Seven: An Urban Centered Economic Strategy for Greater Toronto,” mimeo, November 1994, 11 pp.Google Scholar

Rusk,Cities, pp. xiii–xiv, and p. 1.Google Scholar

In March 1992, the Supreme Court(Freeman v. Pitts) again overruled an appeals court to void an order to bridge municipal lines in order to overcome racial segregation, this time in the Atlanta metropolis. See W. Dennis Keating,The Suburban Racial Dilemma: Housing and Neighborhoods (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994).Google Scholar

Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton,American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of an Underclass (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 10 and chaps. 3-4.Google Scholar

The Suburban Racial Dilemma, table 3, p. 63. Eunice S. Grier and George Grier surveyed the 37 metropolitan areas with more than one million population, finding “most of the black suburban growth… merely an extension of previous segregated patterns,”Minorities in Suburbia: A Mid-1980s Update (a report to the Urban Institute, 1988), p. iii.Google Scholar

American Apartheid, pp. 18-19, emphasis added.Google Scholar

American Apartheid, Chaps. 4 and 6.Google Scholar

Bennett Harrison and Barry Bluestone,The Great U-Turn: Corporate Restructuring and the Polarizing of America (New York: Basic Books, 1988).Google Scholar

Quoted in John Cassidy, “Who Killed the Middle Class?”The New Yorker, (October 16, 1995): 113. Oddly, in an otherwise excellent summary of the worsening of the distribution of income, Cassidynever mentions race.Google Scholar

Edward N. Wolff,Top Heavy: A Study of the Increasing Inequality of Wealth in America (New York: A Report from the Twentieth Century Fund, 1995), 93 pp. The Twentieth Century Fund, a nonprofit and nonpartisan group, “sponsors and supervises timely analyses of economic policy, foreign affairs, and domestic political issues.”Google Scholar

William W. Goldsmith and Edward J. Blakely,Separate Societies: Poverty and Inequality in U.S. Cities (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992), figure 2.7, p. 29.Google Scholar

Johnson’s words appear in theCleveland Policy Planning Report, vol. 1, (1975) p. 1, quoted in Robert Mier,Exclusion and Inadequacy Indexes: Labor Market Indicators for Social Planning (Ithaca: Cornell Dissertations in Planning, 1975), pp. 1-2.Google Scholar

Rebuilding, p. 9Google Scholar

For a review of the way “complexity” theorists view the pernicious dynamics of information flow in large and crowded cities, see Edward L. Glaeser, “Cities, Information, and Economic Growth,”Cityscape: A Journal of Policy Development and Research 1(1), (August, 1994).Google Scholar

There is a long-standing and highly detailed anthropological literature supporting these views. SeeSeparate Societies, chap. 1.Google Scholar

Louis Harris, October-November 1995, conducted for Teens, Crime and the Community of Washington, D.C. These results are in spite of the murder rate doubling among 14–17-year-olds over the decade.Ithaca Journal, (January 11, 1996).Google Scholar

The spread comes about from price inflation, different methods of evaluating tax incidence, and different estimates of how the housing market would adjust were the tax expenditure to be eliminated. One recent comparison puts the entire HUD budget at $26 billion, compared to $54 billion of IRS deductions for mortgage interest and property taxes. Nearly two-fifths of this tax expenditure goes to the 5 percent of taxpayers with incomes over $100,000, while half the homeowners in the country claim no deductions—and tenants don’t qualify. See Peter Dreier and John Atlas, “Reforming the Mansion Subsidy,”The Nation (May 2,1994): 592-95. 26. See estimates in John Pucher, “Urban passenger transport in the United States and Europe: A comparative analysis of public policies,” parts 1 and 2,Transport Reviews 15(2/3), (1995).Google Scholar

Ibid., part 2.Google Scholar

This sentence and the following quote fromThe Suburban Racial Dilemma, p. 5.Google Scholar

From the newsletterToo Much 1(3) (fall 1995).Google Scholar

Henry Phelps Brown,Egalitarianism and the Generation of Inequality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), p. 139; and Molly Ivins, “Deep Voodoo,”Mother Jones, January/February 1991, p. 10; both cited in Sam Pizzigati,The Maximum Wage: A Common-Sense Prescription for Revitalizing America—by Taxing the Very Rich (New York: Apex Press, 1992), p. 79.Google Scholar

The Contract’s second bill, the “Taking Back our Streets Act,” does mention neighborhoods and schools, but only to propose that summer social spending be cut and shifted to prison construction and law enforcement.Google Scholar