"The federal experience with urban revitalization is one of sustained and costly failure."
"America's oldest cities are in trouble," says Ronald Utt of the Heritage Foundation. "More than three decades of federal programs and hundreds of billions of dollars in spending to stem the decline have had little effect on the pace of deterioration -- and may have accelerated it. These cities," Utt reports, "have been steadily losing jobs, businesses, and residents since 1950, but the decline worsened after 1970."
The cause of the exodus is clear. "As many American cities became less attractive places to live," Utt observes, "more and more of their residents chose to leave and move to other cities and communities that maintained a higher quality of living. Businesses and jobs quickly followed their customers and workers to the more attractive locales, setting in motion a chain reaction of deterioration that still characterizes many older cities. Those cities that consistently provided, or re-established, high-quality basic public services and a livable environment are the ones that held onto their populations or reversed earlier declines."
Utt explains how ill-conceived urban renewal efforts only made matters worse. "Federal, state, and local government programs to remedy urban decay have served largely to foster dependency, to concentrate existing and emerging social problems within the central cities, and to favor business and commuters over residents in most revitalization schemes. As a result of these counterproductive policies, cities became increasingly unattractive places to live, and existing and prospective residents responded accordingly."
Utt argues that, "instead of focusing on ways to make cities more livable, government policy makers and local boosters have emphasized policies to encourage suburban people to work and spend money in the city and promoted costly infrastructure investments at the expense of such basic public services as law enforcement and quality schools. After five decades and hundreds of billions of dollars in government spending," he concludes, "the cities that followed this path have neither jobs nor residents and have become increasingly dependent on federal and state governments."
The decline of the cities can be reversed, however. "Developing a successful approach to urban revitalization," Utt counsels, "must begin with the recognition that the cities' now-diminished role as regional commercial centers is permanent and the result of technological forces that will continue to [lessen] the need for concentration of businesses in densely populated urban centers. Instead," he recommends, "cities must follow the development strategy that worked so well for the now-thriving suburbs by placing primary emphasis on becoming an attractive place to live."
Utt insists that cities can attract new residents with "nothing more complicated than good schools and safe streets for low taxes." He predicts that increasing population in and of itself will "foster commercial vitality and a booming job market." New residents will "reshape their communities in ways that ultimately will establish them as attractive places to live and do business. What these revitalized cities will look like," Utt concedes, "is anyone's guess." The one thing they don't need, however, is any more help, or guidance, from Uncle Sam.
