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Perhaps not since the urban upheavals of the 1960s have American
cities and those who care about them faced so many challenges.
The combination of a recession, an unprecedented decline in
home values, and an increase in foreclosure and abandonment
has led to serious budgetary pressure on cities and the county,
state, and federal governments on which they increasingly
rely for assistance. Budget reductions and employee layoffs
have mounted. Fully 88 percent of city finance officers have
told the National League of Cities that they fear they will
be "less able to meet fiscal needs in 2009 than in the
previous year."[1] Virtually all
of the twenty largest U.S. cities are facing looming budget
deficitsincluding (as of August 2009) Jacksonville ($170
million), Chicago ($520 million), and Philadelphia (projected
five-year deficit of $1.4 billion). Just as significantly,
revenue from property tax, income tax, and intergovernmental
aid is declining more rapidly than spending is being cut,
meaning that the pressure on city budgets will only grow in
coming years.
At the same time, more and more citizens are looking to government
for assistance, and taxpayers are more carefully scrutinizing
the value of the public services that they receive in exchange
for their tax dollars. Budget cutting is already widespread:
fire services in Los Angeles, police services in Memphis,
and parks and recreation services in Baltimore. More cuts
may be necessaryand justifiedbut will likely stoke
voter discontent.
It is tritebut still trueto say that in crisis,
there is opportunity. Budgetary pressure can, in a phrase
favored by Stephen Goldsmith, chairman emeritus of the Center
for Civic Innovation, make city services "better, faster,
cheaper." Indeed, improving on those counts can help
citizens get more for their tax dollars as well as lay the
foundation for a healthy city economy.
The Manhattan Institute, through programs such as the Center
for Civic Innovation, has long taken a special interest in
cities and their citizens. As the historical locus of economic
innovation, cultural dynamism, and democratic discourse, cities
are the human ecosystem par excellence. Thriving cities are
key to thriving regions and societies.
Cities do not thrive, however, solely as a result of broad
historical forces and trends. Policy decisions and management
approaches at all levels of government matter greatly. The
"urban renewal" policy of the 1950s and 1960s, which
leveled some historic neighborhoods and routed highways through
others, proved devastating to dozens of American cities, large
and small. Conversely, the "broken windows" approach
to urban policing, as well as the computer-based crime-measurement
system known as CompStat, has led to dramatic reductions in
crime rates in New York and elsewhere since the early 1990s.
Even small changes can make a big difference. Internet and
telephone-based portals such as New York's 311 system and
Louisville's CityCall that allow citizens to access information,
file complaints, and receive responses have changed the way
that city residents relate to municipal government and have
helped incentivize provision of high-quality public services.
"Pay-per-bag" garbage disposal, once little known
outside Seattle, has spread nationwide, enabling jurisdictions
to reduce garbage-disposal costs and increase participation
in recycling programs.
No one can be sure that new initiatives will succeed; nor
can there be guarantees that innovations that work well in
one jurisdiction will work as well in others. But the Manhattan
Institute believes that it is worth researching, developing,
and highlighting policy approaches that have delivered results
or shown promise. We are proud to be closely associated with
CompStat and broken-windows policing, thanks to our close
working relationship with former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani
and former city police commissioner William Brattonwhose
successors have effectively continued and refined the policies.
The Institute also helped lay the intellectual groundwork
for the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation
Act of 1996 (also known as the Welfare Reform Act), whose
emphasis on work, coupled with a lifetime limit on cash assistance,
had a powerful impact on the lives of city residents and their
neighborhoods. We continue to believe that spreading the word
about ideas that have worked, and new ideas that hold promise,
is part of our mission.
This spirit informs the work of our Center for Civic Innovation
and its long-standing Cities on a Hill project. Our goal is
to help develop and advance an effective urban agenda. In
this new series of issue guides aimed at municipal officials,
we present the work of some of our best-known scholars, writing
about issues in which they have decades of expertise.
George Kelling, whose 1982 Atlantic Monthly article
with James Q. Wilson launched the broken-windows policing
revolution, offers a guide to transforming a police department
into an organization whose goal is crime prevention rather
than crime response.
E. J. McMahon, head of our Empire Center for New York State
Policy, presents practical steps that officials can take to
control pension costs and thus ensure that adequate appropriations
will be available for the full range of public purposes. A
former deputy tax commissioner of New York State, McMahon
has written on public-employee pension financing in articles
that have appeared in such publications as the Wall Street
Journal and The Public Interest.
City Journal contributing editor and chartered financial
analyst Nicole Gelinas sorts through the benefits and risks
of using private finance to build or operate public infrastructure
projects, including bridges, airports, and highways. Gelinas
is author of the forthcoming book After
the Fall: Protecting Capitalism from Wall Street and
Washington.
Richard Greenwald, a leader in the Manhattan Institute's
effort to help Newark, New Jersey, implement a model prisoner-reentry
program, maps the maze of overlapping criminal-justice and
social-services programs that must be made to work together
if cities are to deal effectively and compassionately with
the hundreds of thousands of men and women who are released
each year from prison and into urban neighborhoods.
Manhattan Institute senior fellow Marcus Winters, one of
the nation's top young scholars studying the effects of school
choice and teacher incentives on student achievement, provides
a primer on the charter school movement and a guide to structuring
these independent public schools for maximum effectiveness.
Finally, Howard Husock, Manhattan Institute vice president
for policy research and author of America's
Trillion-Dollar Housing Mistake: The Failure of American Housing
Policy, finds a model for freeing cities of the problems
associated with public housing in Atlanta, a city with an
innovative housing authority that is "unfreezing"
public housing real estate to help rebuild the municipal tax
base.
Taken together, this set of policy briefings and proposals
(to which we will continue to add) demonstrates that cities
need notand should notrely on financial assistance
from others to "stimulate" their economies and improve
their neighborhoods. Rather, a willingness to try new approaches
and an insistence on management accountability can unlock
urban advantages masked for too long by poor governance and
policy mistakes.
NOTES
- "City
Fiscal Conditions in 2009," September 2009.
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