Urban Renewal

Strategies to save our cities

Martin Morse Wooster from the November 1994 issue

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Gurwitt profiles Indianapolis Mayor Stephen Goldsmith to highlight the changes these mayors are making. Indianapolis has a long tradition of Republican rule, but Goldsmith's immediate predecessors were big-government men. Richard Lugar (now a senator) annexed the surrounding suburbs, and William Hudnut built scores of facilities, most notably the Hoosierdome, the home of the NFL's Indianapolis Colts. (See "Competitive Instinct, August/September 1993.)

Goldsmith, by contrast, appears to be committed to shrinking the state. Sometimes he has privatized, as in selling the city's golf courses. Other times he has contracted out services, such as trash collection and some road maintenance. But most promising is his call for devolving power to neighborhood associations and local community development organizations, a process Goldsmith calls "municipal federalism." He foresees those local associations ultimately being able to control their own parks and repair their own streets. "Such devolution is an example of the innovative thinking necessary if our cities are to be saved. The federal government can also encourage this process by deregulation, most notably of "unfunded mandates"--regulations Washington creates and then asks cities and states to pay for. As William Tucker reports in the August 1 National Review, the Environmental Protection Agency is the most enthusiastic supporter of those mandates, forcing cities to pay $3.6 billion just to comply with the Clean Water Act. According to the U.S. Conference of Mayors, unfunded mandates will cost cities $54 billion between 1994 and 1998--money that will have to be collected from the taxpayers or diverted from more useful purposes.

The federal government also plays its part in ensuring urban degradation. Ideally, the best way to reduce crime in central cities is to encourage job-creating enterprises, but the failure of Jack Kemp's efforts during the Bush administration shows that Washington isn't any good at pushing people to become enterprising and entrepreneurial. However, the federal government can fight crime in the ghetto by reducing or eliminating barriers to entrepreneurship such as mandatory benefit packages, punitive Social Security taxes, and the Davis-Bacon Act. Repealing mandatory minimum sentencing programs for non-violent offenders and decriminalizing drugs also would free up space in jails for the hardened criminals--violent muggers, armed robbers, murderers, and rapists--who deserve to spend a long time in prison.

Mayors cannot blame all their problems on Washington, however. The failure of the urban renewal programs of the 1960s is a sober reminder that neighborhoods can be destroyed but not created. Pharaonic politicians can spend billions on stadiums, "festival marketplaces," and amusements, but inevitably those ventures will turn into white elephants when sports teams lose or the people's appetite for tschotskes is glutted. The quirky, eccentric, and charming aspects of urban life are best preserved by allowing them to grow organically, through lower taxes and less regulation, not by egotistical politicians eager to turn their city into a casino or a mall.