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Introduction: Solving America's Urban Crisis
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19311 |
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CURRENT ISSUES
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6 / 1991 |
840 Words |
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No one denies that America's big cities are facing ever bigger problems, ranging from declining economic growth and accelerating crime to serious deterioration of their infrastructure. A sense of inevitable decline and fall seems to pervade many urban areas.
Yet, as has often been the case in U.S. history, a coalition of forces has emerged that is helping cities and their inhabitants adjust to the demands of a more highly educated and skilled society. Federal, state, and city governments as well as private citizens and corporations have come together to form this new urban coalition.
They stress the positive, citing the many significant assets that big cities still have--talented and creative people, modern communications, substantial financial resources, sizable tax bases. They point to the city leaders who are coming up with workable solutions like better city management, more realistic use of resources, better federal-state-city cooperation, privatization, and reform politics.
Reformers acknowledge that America's cities no longer dominate the nation economically and socially as they did a generation ago, but they insist that the cities are adjusting to the changing needs of a more decentralized America and preparing the way for an urban renaissance in the 1990s and beyond.
Leading off this month's Special Report is economist Sam Staley, president of the Urban Policy Research Institute, who says that urban America is in the throes of a wrenching social, economic, and political transformation caused by suburbanization and central city decline. The more serious problems include the social isolation of minority communities, a persistent underclass, and a growing underground economy.
Paradoxically, Staley says, suburban villages have grown so rapidly because they have many characteristics of the central city: high-rise office buildings and hotels, sophisticated shopping, cultural amenities, and even high-density housing.
The cities that will not only survive but thrive in the future, argues urban affairs journalist Peter MacDonald, are those that emphasize consensus building and cooperation. For example, Mayor Kurt Schmoke of Baltimore, comfortably in control of city hall and with the business community and the neightborhoods behind him, has created a consensus in favor of attracting high-technology industries, improving public schools,
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