FOR REASONS STEMMING back to first the construction of vast housing projects in the years around WWII and then the Great Society, a sense of socially determined failure had been built into American urban life. The concentration of urban poverty produced by first Jim-Crowism, then federal policy, and finally Crow-Jimism, combined with the deindustrialization of U.S. cities to produce both urban decline and the sense that such decline was inexorable.

By the early 1990s the word “urban” had become a synonym for failure. By 1991, more than 50 percent of all New Yorkers hoped to leave. Daniel Patrick Moynihan spoke for many at the time when he fretted that the future of cities had been spoken for because an entire generation of children had already been lost to urban poverty and dysfunction.

But the 1990s brought in a new generation of mayors who, faced with cities on the verge of collapse and the failure of federal urban policies, innovated to cut hitherto uncontrolled spending, and to confront head-on inter-generational poverty and endemic crime. Unsurprisingly, this task attracted mavericks, who for the most part behaved something like brave sheriffs in old time westerns. They chased some of the bad guys out of town and then rode off into the urban sunset. But when they rode off, the interests that had for so long lived off urban decline re-emerged largely unchastened.

Now, nearly 15 years after the LA and Crown Heights riots, the discussion about cities has changed. These days, it’s more often fueled by a white hot real estate market and an overly optimistic sense of renewal.

In effect, the market-oriented reformers had succeeded sufficiently to allow at least a partial return to the policies that had sent cities sliding downhill in the first place. With crisis and collapse no longer imminent, there’s been less of the sometimes unavoidably hard-edged innovation of the 1990s and a shift back to the old, insider politics of cross-subsidies for the well connected or well organized. The usual suspects of crime, unbearably expensive yet dysfunctional bureaucracies and a hostile business climate are again all too common. And after a decade of dramatic improvements and with the real estate boom keeping coffers full, there’s little sense of urgency remaining. It will be our task to point around the bend to what happens if these follies continue.

Pittsburgh and D.C., their political cultures denuded of seasoned talent, have elected tykes as mayors —Luke Ravenstahl and Anthony Williams— who have yet to show signs that they’re up to the task at hand of restoring their once great cities. Detroit, Philadelphia and New Orleans have all re-elected failed incumbents in races against capable, credible challengers. Oakland has turned hard left with new mayor-elect Ron Dellums, a man who looks back on the black Panthers with admiration. (Ironically, he’s replacing term-limited Jerry “Spaceship Earth” Brown, who governed as a moderate for the most part). Across the Bay, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsome, buoyed by sky-high real estate values, has evaded the problems of soaring crime, a vast homeless population and inadequate transportation by mostly calling for a return the kind of active federal policies that laid the cities low in the years following the 1960s.

There are hopeful exceptions, like Shirley Franklin in Atlanta, who has redeemed her city’s finances and newly elected Mayor Corey Booker of Newark. Both Atlanta and Newark, saddled by corrupt regimes, missed the reforms of the 1990s, and are now implementing many of the changes undertaken by other cities a decade ago. In Chicago, the last of the notorious Robert Taylor homes are coming down, allowing at least some of its once trapped residents to find work in the lower middle class economy made possible by welfare reform.

In Los Angeles, the book is still out on Mayor Villaraigosa, who’s taken some strides on school reform, as has Mayor Bloomberg in New York, where executive control has to date yielded at best unimpressive results. The idea of mayoral accountability for schools is spreading, but it will come to little unless it’s accompanied by a return to the educational basics.

For all of the current real estate born glow, time is shorter than it seems. The patient was in remission during the 1990s, but the cancer of declining populations, bloated civil services, and economic over-regulation whose costs push out private businesses is still salient in most cities. The new arrivals who buoyed urban economies in the 1990s tended to be immigrants, recent college graduates and empty nesters, -- three groups that tend to be civically disengaged, and unlikely to make a long term commitment to the city they temporarily reside in. There is no substitute for an active and stable middle class if a city is to have a healthy civic life.

In the face of these looming troubles, there’s been a return to new versions of the schemes and gimmicks that damaged American cities in the first place. In New York, Mayor Bloomberg’s economic policy seems to consist, rezoning aside, of directing massive subsidies to well-connected developers, while other cities have succumbed to stadium and museum mania, while still others have purchased the snake oil being hawked by the Richard Florida, who insists that your school can fail, crime can be intolerable but all will be well if you can subsidize enough of the “brights” of the so-called “creative class.”

For all the talk of downtown revivals, the cities are still losing population to the low cost living of exurbia. Increasingly dependent on a relative handful of high earners who can easily relocate, cities are vulnerable to terrorist attacks and natural disasters that can change the equation dramatically. And for all the gains achieved by extraordinary police chiefs like Bill Bratton of Boston, New York and then Los Angeles, Ray Kelly of New York, and John Timoney of Miami, most cities, as demonstrated in New Orleans, Washington and Detroit, have yet to begin to effectively deal with their crime problems. And those failings will only be exacerbated when the chronic offenders incarcerated in the 1990s return to the neighborhoods from whence they came. If they are allowed to return to their old ways we may once again hear people speaking about an underclass.

To return to the issue of where America’s cities will be and should be 10 years from now, the question is: Can the present mood of optimism be used to generate a new urban vision, or was the drop in crime and the urban boomlet it helped generated just a spike in a graph whose long term trend continues downward? We’ll be reporting…