The Republican Way to Urban Renewal
An article in October 7th's Washington Post detailed the Obama Administration’s new effort to revitalize America’s urban centers. While the rehabilitation of New York, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles and Chicago over the last two decades have led many to declare a national urban renaissance, most American cities, from Detroit to Schenectady, remain locked in a dead-end of crime, debt and deteriorating public services. To succeed, a national urban renaissance should be based on sound urban management, not just federal spending.
An urban renaissance must focus on sustainable spending. Our nation’s decaying cities are littered with downtown malls, civic centers and arenas. More often than not, these projects failed because the kinds of necessary improvements to civic life in education, healthcare, policing and basic services are ignored in favor of ‘get rich quick’ schemes. In a 2007 study of Massachusetts’ decaying cities, the Pioneer Institute stressed the need for fiscal discipline as a key element in attracting and maintaining outside investment. Whether it comes in the guise of tax incentives or block grants, unrestrained federal spending on our cities or our suburbs will only put off hard choices.
In this vein, conservatives must take a stand against one of the most alluring and least effective forms of profligate municipal spending: tax-increment financing. TIFs ostensibly support development in ‘blighted’ areas by offsetting private costs with a portion of local property taxes. But TIF-ing an area has been shown to do little in the way of permanently improving municipalities’ development prospects and can easily fall prey to the interests of developers and politicians while stifling community innovation. Ultimately, TIFs are a ‘pro-business’ guise for spending profligacy that avoids difficult choices about how municipalities should spend their limited resources.
Even ‘successful’ urban redevelopment strategies rarely touch the lives of the urban underclass. Urban development programs have been very good at attracting middle class people from outside the community, but less good at educating, protecting and advancing the disadvantaged people who already live in these cities. The Atlantic’s Hanna Rosin detailed the ways in which the highly-touted HOPE VI program succeeds in part by exporting a city’s poor, rather than by actually improving their own lives. The Pioneer study shows that even when depressed Massachusetts cities like Leominster or Springfield succeed in attracting large companies, those companies cannot afford to hire locals. Urban developers have much to say about attracting ‘new’ people to ‘revitalized districts but are more or less mum on what to do with current residents.
The Johnson Administration’s ambitious and well meaning programs fell apart on the shoals of unsustainability, incivility and rising crime. A national urban renaissance that does not focus, first and foremost on making cities safe, improving local education and promoting fiscal discipline is doomed to fail.