Cities
Muchnick, David M.
I n June 1976, Jimmy Carter promised the nation's mayors a "compassionate, realistic" urban policy. Although the President has yet to elaborate his vision of a revitalized urban America, enough...
...Conference of Mayors said that the nomination revealed "a striking insensitivity to the problems of cities...
...And so this technocratic urbanology obscures the fact that only by upsetting the structural arrangements of the corporatefederalsuburban alliance can we free our central cities from their straitjacket of the politics of the desperate fight for survival...
...Newark's Mayor Gibson refused to take the Carter economic package as a symbol that the President would be less sympathetic to urban needs than the mayors had expected...
...Present economic and political circumstances warrant neither an extension of the three-year emergency-loan program nor federal guarantees for future city borrowings...
...But compassionate tinkering will not resolve the urban crisis...
...Our urban crisis presents an ultimate crisis to our national community and our democracy...
...The Administration's message, Gibson concluded, "reinforces our optimism for the recovery of our cities...
...Masses of workers and machines grouped conveniently close to rivers and railheads are no longer technically necessary for industrial production...
...As corporate and governmental allies increasingly plan the relationships between economic growth and local development and disdevelopment, they have stripped the power of self-determination from localities—be they beneficiaries or victims of private or public investment decisions...
...It symbolizes the uncoupling of the last century-andahalf's deterministic relations among industrial production, territorial location, and residential patterns...
...The President responded to the pleas of his new Secretary for Housing and Urban Development for additional funds for her "starved" Department by giving her about half of the budget increases she had requested...
...Three months later, he softened that stand...
...Carter expected the $I billion moratorium problem to be solved "locally...
...It fosters a materialist view of cities as fungible repositories of capital, machines and labor, whose social value is merely a matter of utility for profitable production...
...Parasitic regional development, too, fosters disloyalty to our national community...
...Compassion indeed is the critical difference between the Carter administration's liberal technocrats and the preceding regime's conservative technocrats...
...Carter had agreed also called for a "massive effort" to meet the needs of our major older cities...
...And there was some concern that it may take as long as two years for her to learn the 118 complexity of urban problems and to master the departmental reins...
...The mayors proposed a one-year $20 billion stimulus, including $7.7 billion in tax cuts and $12.3 billion in federal spending for countercyclical revenue sharing, public-works projects, and public-service jobs...
...Yet, the rise of the Sunbelt and the suburbs has critical significance...
...Anything less is not likely to make much difference to cities as centers of business, social, and cultural life...
...They may even hold us together for a while—at least until the honeymoon is over...
...Nobody knows just how to do this, except that it would require...
...The sources of the Carter administration's realism run deep...
...Many older residents of the metropolis have forgotten and many younger ones are not learning how to live in the universalism that cities must have in order to work—in what Kalman Silvert called the affectionate impersonality that permits strangers to live in close cooperation in complex urban settings...
...Conference of Mayors, testified that the Carter program would fall short of urban needs to create jobs and expand city services...
...Carter made aid to the cities dependent upon spending for national defense as a first priority...
...President Carter's compassionate realism is simply more humane than President Ford's new realism...
...White House economic planners expect that it will be about four years before the private economy will operate at full steam and have the capacity to generate the $60 billion fiscal dividend thought necessary to finance adventurous social programs...
...Regardless, it is the symbolism in the Harris appointment that is significant...
...Carter's pledge that "bankruptcy is not a viable alternative for New York...
...Currently we are simply relocating our traditional mode of urban development to sunnier regions— and there, too, the tell-tale signs of metropolitan inequalities and central-city deterioration are beginning to appear...
...he endorsed the mayors' plank in the Democratic platform declaring the "social defense of the nation as important as its military defense...
...Compassion affects the terms of disdevelopment and shrinkage now being negotiated by these cities as they are forced to adjust to the new realities of global political economy and southern and suburban development...
...What's more, the Carter administration's realists have apparently accepted the prevailing patterns of metropolitan development and disdevelopment as 119 natural and inevitable phenomena that set the boundaries of compassionate tinkering with urban problems...
...As a nation we pay a heavy toll for limiting the urban debate to the degree of compassionate tinkering that technocrats are permitted to indulge in by the corporate-federal-suburban alliance...
...Concluding his first budget review, President Carter was expected to recommend an estimated $10 billion increase over the present fiscal year's $110 billion for defense...
...Yet, as the city reached the fiscal brink in early March, the President apparently reversed himself and dangled the elusive carrot of a long-term loan extension to induce New York's banks and unions to settle the immediate crisis...
...Nevertheless, when New York's banks and municipal unions sought the specifics of Mr...
...Worse, technocratic urban policy threatens to destroy our urbanity and to tear apart our national community...
...The Harris nomination also presaged the advent of a caretaker regime at HUD for the immediate future...
...Carter's meetings with mayors and governors as "showing considerably more understanding of and sympathy for the plight of urban America than his predecessor...
...Although the President has yet to elaborate his vision of a revitalized urban America, enough has been said and done during the campaign, the transition, and the first two months in office to illuminate the new Administration's balance between realism and compassion in the foreseeable future...
...Realistically, Business Week concluded, restoring the cities to self-sufficiency means enabling them to compete economically with the suburbs for [the middle class and business...
...Yet, apparently, cutting defense spending to finance domestic investment remains unrealistic...
...The platform on which the mayors and Mr...
...The selection of new HUD Secretary Patricia Roberts Harris was another disappointment to the mayors and the housing industry...
...PRESIDENTIAL COMPASSION on housing and community development issues is critical to preserving any semblance of decency in America's older cities...
...Newark's Mayor Kenneth Gibson, the president of the U.S...
...However, technocratic acceptance of contemporary developmental parameters threatens not only critical thinking about such alternatives but even the most traditional projects for redeveloping our older central cities...
...September 20, 1976, p. 20.] Not surprisingly, the nation's mayors were "extremely disappointed" by President Carter's two-year $31.2 billion economic stimulus package...
...Technocratic urbanology" obscures the fact that the present course of metropolitan development and disdevelopment is the product of a more-or-less easy alliance between national and transnational corporations, the federal government, and suburban landowners...
...Democratic solutions require us to think critically about the kinds of spatial, economic, and political arrangements we can create to realize our ideal of a national community of equally participant in120 dividuals empowered through these arrangements to reason together in a continuing process of defining the common good...
...It may have upset the mayors that their own Conference president, Mayor Gibson, reportedly was dropped as the nominee only at the last moment...
...Reportedly, Secretary Harris surprised and impressed the midJanuary convention of the U.S...
...Accordingly, we are being taught to accept as fact that America can live without the past grandeur of her older cities...
...117 Campaigning last April, Mr...
...No one was surprised when the Carter administration announced plans to extend the community development program for another three years, to increase its funding to $4.3 billion by fiscal year 1980, and to target the funds toward the big cities with the greatest needs...
...Damning New York is the behavior of America's new urban villagers people who live in cities but are not yet urbane, people unable to empathize across local and regional bounds and pledge allegiance to a national community...
...There were rumors that the new Secretary is marking time, waiting for the first vacancy on the Supreme Court...
...If no changes are made in the existing program, the 17 biggest cities in the Northeast and Midwest (with the exception of New York and Chicago) will stand to lose on the order of $170 million yearly—to the further deterioration of their own municipal services and financial situations and to the eventual benefit of prospering suburbs and Sunbelt cities...
...We have no quick fix for housing and urban problems," he said...
...yet his economic package may produce an estimated $60 billion deficit in the current fiscal year's budget...
...Nor would there be a federal commitment to the older cities sufficient to enable them to compete economically with their suburbs and the Sunbelt cities...
...We are free to choose rationally among alternative ways of organizing our productive sector, our living arrangements, and our political institutions to fulfill our democratic dreams of selfdetermination and self-governance...
...Favored by these investment and location policies, the suburban members of this alliance have also been encouraged by the federal executive and the Supreme Court to encapsulate minorities and poor people within the central cities—leaving conservative and liberal technocrats to argue only over the limited degree of access to be permitted by the suburban ring...
...Depressed by a court order that had upset the moratorium on repayment of nearly $1 billion in short-term city notes, the two officials left the meeting in high spirits, buoyed by Mr...
...Nonetheless, two months later Business Week quoted a "Carter aide" as saying, "There is no Hubert Humphrey Marshall Plan for the cities in the cards at the moment...
...In addition, mayors and their constituents, professional experts and interest groups, the Senate, House, and HUD are either divided or undecided on what should be done to restore our cities...
...the kind of investment that has produced pieces of the city, including whole business districts, in the suburbs over the past several decades...
...One Administration aide predicted that big-city mayors with fiscal problems would welcome the proposed amendments warmly, some smaller towns would be less delighted, and urban counties would be cool to the changes...
...The governors of several Northeastern states had expressed similar feelings after an earlier series of meetings with the President-Elect and his advisers to discuss regional redevelopment plans...
...In late December, the President-Elect fulfilled his campaign promise to meet with New York Governor Hugh Carey and New York City Mayor Abraham Beame and discuss the fiscal crisis...
...Nevertheless, although humane technocrats may cushion the sacrifices of municipal readjustment, as Business Week realistically suggested, compassionate realism is not enough to enable our older cities to challenge the social, economic, and political forces that lead to their decline...
...Although, by early March, his commitment to the cities seemed ambivalent, there remains a broad consensus that Jimmy Carter will be more compassionate, more cooperative, and more accessible on urban affairs than his Republican predecessors...
...Carter's failure to designate a "person with demonstrated experience and expertise in housing and urban development...
...The President has pledged to be "tough" on all requests for new spending and to balance the federal budget by 1981...
...When a location has been stripped of its profitability, it is left to become a shadow of its former self, perhaps even a ghost town...
...Conference of Mayors with her grasp of their problems and her pledge that "the White House is now in the hands of a friend of the cities...
...There remains a sizable gap between the President's plans for $4.5 billion in public-works spending over the next two years and the nearly $24 billion sought for such projects by 25,000 localities last December...
...Indeed, Jimmy Carter has reportedly accepted the invitation of the Episcopal Bishop of New York to visit the South Bronx and see the slums for himself...
...Yet, if the present formula for allocating funds is not amended, it still will continue to favor the South over the Northeast and Midwest and it will favor the suburbs and rural areas over central cities...
...The President sent five cabinet appointees and four top White House staffers to address the convention—a gesture Mayor Gibson hailed as "the beginning of a new relationship" in which "we will be consulted before—and not after—executive decisions have been made...
...This uncritical acceptance is the essence of technocratic thinking...
...The National Association of Home Builders criticized Mr...
...q 121...
...The U.S...
...Before her nomination, the deputy director of the HUD transition team, Al Stern, had cautioned against expecting any bold or startling new programs...
...The objectives will be to improve the efficiency of existing programs and to target money to the areas of the country with the greatest need...
...Yet, technocratic urbanology suggests no reason for raising the question, for it is antiurbane as well...
...When midwestern farmers condemn aid to New York City and conveniently forget who pays to maintain parity pricing if trouble hits the farm, when southerners cheer the drop-dead message to New York and readily overlook whose tax dollars and jobs have been pouring into their region and which cities have given refuge to millions of displaced southern farm workers, and when Texas corporations sit on their natural gas reserves and freeze northern families, they disavow their membership in a national community...
...Jimmy Carter's decency and compassion are reportedly genuine and surely refreshing...
...A HUD official added that the Administration wants to make sure that localities help poor people with the money they receive under the act...
...The residential ghettos of our metropolitan areas foster not only different images of reality among middle-class suburbanites and impoverished central-city slum dwellers but genuine fear and ignorance...
...New York City's Deputy Mayor John Zuccotti, who had been a strong candidate for secretary or undersecretary of HUD, said that Mr...
...A year-end editorial in the New York Times hailed Mr...
...Carter's commitment to the city, the Administration retreated to the hard line prevailing in Congress...
...Neither Carter nor Ford is talking about such investment...
...Once again it appears that the interests of cities can be subordinated, and on this occasion not to national defense or macroeconomic considerations but to the President's own political interests—a gesture to his female and black constituencies...
Vol. 24 • April 1977 • No. 2
