It's been a rocky seven months for Corey Booker, the newly elected mayor of Newark, New Jersey's biggest city, who yesterday delivered his first State of the City address. 
 
Speaking for nearly two hours, Booker gave pride of place to bringing crime under control: "The number one mission of this city is to secure the safety of its citizens,'' Booker said during his speech in the City Council chamber. "I will not stop until confidence is restored to our community. The streets belong to us, not a small minority of people who continue to inflict harm upon our community. We will win this effort.''

So far he hasn't: the city's murder rate, among the nation's highest, is up since Booker took office, and crime continues to plague the city.

But he has made headway: Shootings are down 22 percent since Booker took office. He's created a new fugitive unit that's already captured 225 people. He's moving the majority of police officers to night shifts, when most of the crime occurs. He's installing a network of high-tech cameras throughout the city that can be monitored from a central command, and has the city set up to receive at no cost a second police helicopter, which will be equipped with a night vision camera system.

He's also gotten the city's business leaders to invest in his crime plan. He used the speech to announce the creation of a private police foundation, which has already raised $1 million from local corporations, that will put 150 computers into patrol cars, touted  a drop in overall crime.

All of which bodes well for Booker's broader agenda that includes attracting news businesses to Newark, retaking control of the city's schools from the state, introducing charter schools, and turning around a city that's never recovered from the 1967 riots that chased manufacturing and the middle class from the city.
 
The city has the resources to recover from its long decline. In a dispatch this week, the Economist points out that Booker has taken control of a city that "is only eight miles from New York… has a busy port, a bustling airport and a top-notch transit system for would-be commuters. It has a few good universities. Companies as well as ordinary people priced out of Manhattan are beginning to discover Newark." Manhattan Institute scholar

Manhattan Institute scholar Julia Vitullo-Martin, sees Newark as the "post-industrial city… with the best chance of returning to the ranks of the successful," and adds to the list above that because of the city's "international container port on the waterfront, passenger and freight railroads, a light rail, and highways[,] Newark is easier to access than almost any city of its size in America. In honor of its sense of itself as an entrance to the New York metropolitan region it named one of its corporate developments Gateway—but this status remains in the future. Indeed, Newark's tremendous potential remains just that—potential waiting to be actualized."

For all that, though, Vitullo-Martin makes clear that the damage done over the past 40 years means there are no guarantees of success:

Newark is a living laboratory for nearly every bad planning idea of the 20th century. Urban renewal destroyed whole neighborhoods, replacing low-rise, vernacular residences with public housing projects. Built on superblocks, the projects wiped out the original grid as well as commercial and retail activity. Soaring crime was excused and tolerated. Interstate highways cut the city into pieces, dividing and isolating it. Corporations, most prominently Prudential Insurance, tried to help. But they built fortress-like towers, connected to the train station and each other by skywalks, bypassing the streets entirely and even turning their backs on the waterfront, now walled off by parking garages and hostile structures. What was supposed to have been a major downtown asset, Military Park, was elevated and gated, limiting public access to a few hidden entrances. Meanwhile, surface roads were widened to facilitate fast traffic, making escape to the suburbs easy and efficient. Gradually, stores, restaurants, and cafes closed, leaving only a few discount stores behind.

And City Journal contributing editor Steve Malanga recalls that the city has had its hopes of revival disappointed before:

Sharpe James won his first election 20 years ago as a reformer, proclaiming that under his predecessor, Kenneth Gibson, Newark had become “fear city and dope city.” Gibson in turn had won election 16 years earlier on a reform platform, promising to rebuild Newark in the wake of the riots and the scandal-plagued administration of Mayor Hugh Addonizio. Newark has listened to promises of a better tomorrow for nearly 40 years now with little payoff, except for those in power.

  And no matter how good Booker's ideas and intentions may be, it will take time to clean up the mess he's inherited. He's not yet cut into the murder rate—among the nation's highest—that he inherited from his corrupt predecessor in office. While James campaigned on a supposed $30 million surplus, Booker discovered he'd in fact inherited a $44 million deficit he had to raise property taxes to fill. He's had to clean a government riddled with incompetence and corruption in a city where over one quarter of all city's residents live in poverty.

Still, early signs suggest that Booker has taken the Rudy route of getting crime control first so that the other elements of a civil and productive city can take hold. That is, he's cleaning up the brush that obscures the other problems, and constantly threatens to erupt and engulf the city. And in some ways he's at an advantage—the low-lying fruit, as it were, that New York and other city's picked in the 90s is still there to be picked in Newark.

There's a long ways to go and no guarantee of success, but Booker has already begun to change expectations—where James pointed the finger for Newark's problems at Washington, Booker has pointed it at himself, and asked to be held accountable.