Civic Pride Is Making A Comeback

As Henry Cisneros, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, sees it, the long and devastating “free fall” of American cities is over, and the difficult climb back has begun.

He may be right.

New York City has a good chance of ending the year with 1,000 murders or less, a terrifying statistic in most venues but a reason to celebrate in the Big Apple, which suffered through a record 2,245 homicides in 1990.

In Detroit, which came up with the quaint custom of burning itself down every Halloween, a genuine rehabilitation seems to be under way. There has been some modest job creation, an increase in home ownership, a commitment of $2 billion in private investments in the city’s empowerment zone and a resurgence of the downtown area, which was in pitiful shape (especially at night) just a few years ago.

A symbol of the renewed action in Detroit is the serious effort by the football Lions to arrange a return to the city. The Lions have been holed up for years in suburban Pontiac, Mich.

Chicago, Philadelphia, Kansas City, Cleveland - all are making headway in the areas of employment, public safety, neighborhood revitalization and civic pride. Even Newark, N.J., comatose since the riots of 1967, appears to be waking up. Among other things, Newark’s rancid high-rise public housing complexes are being demolished and housing more suitable to the human species is being built.

“Unemployment is down in the cities, crime rates are down, and some job creation is up,” said Cisneros. “I’m not saying the cities have recovered, but they are recovering.”

Slowly.

It’s not that the Clinton administration has been a champion of the cities; far from it.

But since Bill Clinton became president, cities have at least been able to get a hearing in Washington. And some members of the administration, most notably Cisneros and Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, have been passionate and eloquent advocates for cities.

This is a vast change from the approach of the Reagan and Bush administrations. The idea then was to go Gerald Ford one better and tell all of urban America to drop dead.

Without some federal support local efforts are doomed. In making the case for the Clinton administration, Cisneros points to several things: to federal support for anti-crime initiatives; to changes in public housing policies away from high-rises filled with the poorest of the poor to lower density, mixed-income dwellings; and to the creation of urban empowerment zones, which carry with them a whole load of federal subsidies and tax benefits.

It is too early to gauge the impact of the empowerment zones, but the other efforts have been helpful. And cities have unquestionably benefited from the continued push to make credit more readily available through programs like the Community Reinvestment Act and the low-income housing tax credit. The administration has steadfastly defended these programs from assaults by conservative legislators.

“What we’ve really seen is a credit revolution in the inner city,” said Paul Grogan, president of the Local Initiatives Support Corp., a nonprofit outfit that helps in the rebuilding of deteriorated neighborhoods. “There have been large rises in home ownership rates for African-Americans and Hispanics, and the availability of bank credit for all manner of activity has risen.”

Most important, the cities have benefited from the overall improvements in the economy. The top 50 cities have seen their official unemployment rate decline by 2.5 percent over the past four years. In Detroit the decline was nearly 7 percent. In Cleveland, 4 percent.

More people working means more people buying and furnishing homes and paying taxes.

The flip side of the good news is that the burden of federal budget-cutting continues to fall disproportionately on the shoulders of the cities. And the narrow, unfair and remarkably uncreative ways in which spending is being cut is sapping the nation’s ability to invest in education, additional job creation, the infrastructure and the environment - all areas that would benefit cities and the nation as a whole.

Nevertheless, good news is good news. It’s heartening to see flowers emerging from the rubble.

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