Thursday’s Wall Street Journal makes clear that subprime mortgage delinquencies are not just a problem for the bond markets and homeowners—they’re a special problem for cities. The maps and tables of Where Subprime Delinquencies are Getting Worse show that subprime defaults are geographically concentrated and that much of that concentration occurs in cities. In Oakland, 12 percent of all subprimes are delinquent for 60 days or more; in Sacramento, 14 percent, Boston, 15 percent, Minneapolis 16.5 percent and Detroit, 24.6 percent. In New York City, more than 9,000 homeowners faced foreclosure in 2006, 50% more than in 2005, and the 2007 numbers are even worse so far.

Any delinquency reflects personal hardship, but such concentration can also mean neighborhood problems. If one’s neighbors are behind on mortgage payments, it’s not likely they will paint or do roof repairs either. Such are the ways neighorhoods—and tax bases—go downhill.

One might call this the “default and delinquency belt” phenomenon. I first saw it several years ago on the near-South Side of Chicago, where a community organizer (not Barack Obama) took me on a tour of the Back of the Yards neighborhood. He’d painstakingly assembled data on mortgage defaults—and could point out which houses on which blocks were in trouble. It wasn’t hard to tell. Some had been abandoned and taken over by drug gangs. Blue collar neighbors understood their life savings, tied up in their homes, to be at risk.

The questions arise, however, as to why such urban delinquency belts, as mapped by Journal, have come to be, and what, if anything can or should be done about them?

The meta-narrative in the press and amongst the politicians portrays those in arrears as victims of fast-talking “predatory” salesmen who have targeted the unsophisticated. One suspects the situation is a good deal more complicated than that, that there are multiple and overlapping causes.

One must keep in mind in discussing urban lending that it was not all that long ago (mid to late 1970s) when the concern of cities was redlining—a conscious policy of banks not to lend in urban areas. It was unappreciated by those leading protests that the banking system did not provide incentives for lending in areas where values may have been declining and borrowers were not good underwriting risks. Banks were highly regulated at the time and effectively limited in the interest rates they could set on mortgages. In such a circumstance, it made sense for banks to focus on the best credit risks in the best neighborhoods.

In the years since, the banking industry has changed beyond all recognition. Banks can now branch across state lines. Competition for customers has become fierce. The credit scoring system has developed, allowing lenders to judge individual borrowers with great precision. And deregulation has allowed lenders to set interest rates in line with the risk reflected by those credit histories. Such loans are what we are now calling subprime.

Just as significantly, new sophisticated secondary mortgage markets developed, which aggregated lots of both prime and subprime offerings in distinct bond offerings and brought them to investors around the world. No longer did individual banks have to hold on to loans themselves—“keep them in portfolio”—and bear all the risk. Thus were the stars aligned for a flood of loan capital to come to types of customers and areas which had not had loans on offer before. What’s more, all sorts of new loan “products” also emerged—mortgages with low “teaser” rates that would later adjust upward, for instance.

These loans are one part of the delinquency belt story. During the housing boom, it made sense for all sorts of lenders, buyers and owners to take big risks. If prices were going up, owners figured that even if they might have a hard time making payments, they could sell and pay off their mortgages, and still pocket a profit. The leveling off and in some areas decline in housing prices has changed that game. Owners are now stuck with negative equity homes worth less than their mortgages. That’s a precursor to delinquency and default.

Why would such loans be concentrated in cities? Because in the hyper-competitive banking market, lenders were looking everywhere for untapped borrowers. There can be little doubt that some fast-talking mortgage salesman emphasized the cash which owners could get if they took out a home equity mortgage. For cash-strapped owners in cities with lousy economies—Detroit or the old mill town of Danville, Virginia, for instance—this was a way to get extra cash. For owners in areas of rising home values, this was a chance to gamble on a continued rise. One can be sure that mortgage salesmen did not emphasize looming higher payments, and the problems these payments would cause for those living on fixed or limited incomes in the Detroits of the country, or the prospect of a home’s value actually declining. This would help explain high delinquency rates in cities such as Worcester, Massachusetts—where values had long been rising but where the harsh reality of a housing price decline has recently set in.

Add to all this the Community Reinvestment Act, federal legislation enacted a generation ago in the wake of the protests against “red-lining” that required banks to make loans in so-called under-served urban areas and to under-served racial minority groups. A bank’s CRA ratings as determined by federal regulators can stand in the way of the mergers and acquisitions which have swept the industry in recent years. But bankers have little incentive to do much due diligence when it comes to meeting CRA requirements which they’ve historically viewed as a cost of doing business. Subprime lending seemed to offer a better model in which loans to minority borrowers in under-served neighborhoods could also be profitable. No wonder the tap was open so wide.

What can be done at this point to help both subprime borrowers and the cities in which they live? Democratic politicians, including Hilary Clinton and Christopher Dodd, are, not surprisingly, calling for aid to beleaguered borrowers. But as City Journal contributing editor Nicole Gelinas has pointed out, this would pose a huge moral hazard—those who were prudent and careful about going into debt would, in effect, be asked to pay off the bills of those who didn’t. The Ohio Housing Finance Agency has, in this vein, already announced it will float $100 million in bonds to allow subprime borrowers to refinance with state subsidy. My 82-year-old father in suburban Cleveland, who has no mortgage but plenty of other bills, thus has to help those who took foolish risks. A bailout, in other words, is not the way to go. Neither is so-called “suitability” legislation, which would restrict lenders to offering mortgages which borrowers could afford, based on some regulatory standard. We will not help the upwardly mobile poor or others by stripping them of their autonomy this way.

Mayors should call on federal regulators to compile data on delinquencies among loans which have counted for “CRA credit”. They might then find out that something they thought was good for cities actually was not. Local governments and nonprofits should take the occasion of the “subprime crisis” to educate potential buyers and owners about the risks that come with debt. We are in the midst of a painful market correction, and while that’s how people learn, there is no doubt that there will be collateral damage for cities.

Howard Husock is the Vice President of Programs and the Director of the Manhattan Institute's Social Entrepreneurship Initiative. He was formerly the director of case studies in public policy and management at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government.

Fifty years ago West Side Story laid out the plan: "somewhere we'll find a new way of living" in "peace and quiet and open air." The musical's anti-urban message captured the then-dominant opinionthat cities were crowded and complicated and needed radical intervention. Now we are learning that cities work best when they are well-populated and complicated. Instead of believing something is terribly wrong with cities, municipal leaders think there was something terribly wrong with the post-war policies intended to fix cities.

Recently Boston Mayor Tom Menino and his city council tentatively decided to leave the building. The building being City Hall, designed by Gerhard M. Kallmann, Noel M. McKinnell, and Edward F. Knowles, three Columbia University professors who'd won a nationwide design contest in 1962. The brutalist concrete structure sits in a sterile unloved plaza called Government Center designed by the famous architect I.M.Pei. The mayor, council and their constituents had finally had enough after 40 years of exposure to this depressing modernist icon. They're eying a site on Boston Harbor just a few blocks away and you can bet concrete brutalism won't be part of the plan. As urban living has gained favor in the real estate market, cities and citizens are taking their own opinions of architecture and planning more seriously. The fine grain fabric of cities that post war planners attempted to remove is now seen as a lifestyle amenity that even new suburban developments try to mimic.

Criticism of modernist architecture is not hard to find. Even enthusiastic supporters of modernism concede that the movement fell short of its initial promise, particularly in the delivery of public housing. But, more stunning than the failure of Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis or Cabrini Green in Chicago is that America's architectural establishment, which is overwhelmingly modernist, has almost completely withdrawn from any effort to serve the basic needs of people. Our star architects design large scale iconic objects and leave the provision of the remaining ingredients of the community to developers and the specialists they hire—traffic engineers, hvac and sprinkler fitters for example. The modernist style of steel and glass with little ornamentation is normative (just look at any office park). Yet the modernist movement is exhausted, lacking any of the messianic zeal that filled it in the days of Corbusier, van der Rohe and Gropius. In From a Cause to a Style, sociologist Nathan Glazer laments the loss of the idealism and zeal that designers possessed in the post-war period. He finds it ironic that it was "when architects and planners became most concerned with improving the lives of ordinary people... that to present eyes they committed some of their most grievous errors."

From a Cause to a Style is a compilation of previous published essays by Glazer that he's updated. With books piled at my bedside I often skip compilations, but this one succeeds as a book, held together by Glazer's obvious passion for cities—especially New York. In the middle is a sweet chapter on Daniel Patrick Moynihan, co-author of Glazer's most famous book, Beyond the Melting Pot. Moynihan valued cities more than anyone else who ever served in either house of Congress. He also knew, when cities were at their lowest ebb in the mid 1970s that architecture and design were powerful assets for cities. Like Ed Banfield, who wrote The Unheavenly City, Glazer and Moynihan early on understood that cities needed appreciation for their assets even more than sympathy for their pathology.

No one's yet replaced Moynihan's leadership at the Federal level, but help may be on the way as local officials take more active roles in planning and design. Mayors Bloomberg in New York, Daley in Chicago and Villaraigosa in Los Angeles have all embraced design and planning strategies that embrace urbanism. There is also the new urbanist movement, which was created to restore urban form and technique to common practice in the building industry. Glazer credits new urbanists for striving to serve the needs of ordinary people. Perhaps because he is a native New Yorker, he worries that new urbanists focus too much on fixing the burbs and not enough on the cities. New urbanists would counter that we work at all sectors of the urban transect from rural hamlet to big city center because we believe the blessings of urbanism can be calibrated to benefit all human settlement. Whatever doubts he has about new urbanism, Glazer is an inspiration to anyone who appreciates the value of cities and the people who live in them.

John Norquist is President and CEO of the Congress for the New Urbanism and served from 1988 to 2004 as Mayor of Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

A visit to Wellington, New Zealand, capital of the nation of some four million, takes one to a small San Francisco deep in the southern hemisphere. It is so far south that even in the summer winds from Antarctica buffet Wellington, making a run along the South Pacific waterfront no less arduous than a winter jog in Central Park, albeit warmer. The San Francisco comparison extends past the setting of hills and bay; a gold rush came here not long after California, and many of the same players sailed west to take advantage of it. San Francisco-style pastel Victorian homes dot the older streets and there’s even a cable car from Lambton Quay, the city’s main shopping street, up the steep hillside overlooking Victoria University.

These sorts of atmospherics are not all that is familiar about this most isolated of world capitols. Notwithstanding the prosperity that has come to New Zealand in recent years—as wine (Pinot Noir and Sauvignon Blanc, in particular), film-making, software development and tourism have complemented agricultural exports—the Wellington papers were filled with accounts of the same sorts of social problems with which the U.S. wrestles.

Not that New Zealand understands itself to have much in common with the hated Americans. Once a small but effective military power—part of the Australia-New Zealand ANZAC forces in World Wars I and II, New Zealand, especially under current Labour Prime Minister Helen Clark, has chosen the Left course in world affairs. As Canada is to the US, so New Zealand is to Australia—ostentatiously Green, agnostic at best in the war on terror and unwilling, since the 1980s, to let the US nuclear fleet dock here. (When one enters the city, a sign welcomes the visitor to “nuclear-free” Wellington).

But the question of the welfare state and its appropriate extent plays out here, as in all developed countries.

New Zealand’s British-style national health service places the details of medical care in the province of the government. The Dominion Post headlined the fact that more than 1600 patients have been removed from surgical waiting lists as part of a “drastic cut that health bosses blame on an aging population and rising violence in the community.” The secret to cost control, in other words, is triage.

Rising violence would not be associated in the American mind with New Zealand—and, indeed, the major cites of Wellington, Auckland and Christchurch are mostly clean and safe. But Conservative challenger John Key has framed the upcoming national election around the emergence of a Kiwi “underclass”—which is code for gang and household violence among the Maori population, the descendants of the indigenous south Pacific islanders whose sociology is an unlovely combination of Native American and African American-style problems. Like Native Americans, the Maori control significant land and mineral assets—and, as in Canada, government-created trusts, based on an 19th-century treaty, give commercial control of these to Maori leaders.

But this significant wealth has not been sufficient to keep a growing Maori population from migrating to the cities, where, especially in Auckland, New Zealand’s largest city, they have become ghettoized, dominated by single-parent families and dependent on a generous dole. The nation was abuzz during my visit with the story of a household receiving some $1500 a month in support—but in which a child had died as the result of abuse. There are significant Maori gangs, notable for their tattoos (actually a Maori tradition) and who have taken up rap music and baggy pants, as a result of the export of American underclass culture through films and music videos. The New Zealand Herald reports that “posties” would not make deliveries in three Maori-dominated neighborhoods in Hamilton. A poignant treatment of the degeneration of Maori culture can be seen in the powerful 1994 film, “Once Were Warriors,” set in Auckland and based on the book of the same name.

Like American blacks, the Maori are a significant political force and issue. They comprise fully 15 percent of the population, have their own political party and are guaranteed seats in Parliament. So, too, are they conflicted about their situation, with appeals to race pride coupled with calls to end gang violence and take advantage of New Zealand’s healthy economy. Maori Party leader Pita Sharples has called for the “banning of gang insignia” and of gangs that “the distribution and manufacture of methamphetamine.. . .I recognize that a lot are Maori gangs and I would call on Maori tribes, tribal organizations, committees and Maori families to not accept the current behavior.”

Still, New Zealand’s government, like Australia’s, has much to teach. Its New Public Management initiative, brought in by the Labour Party in the late 1980s, led to massive sell-offs of state-owned enterprises and, more relevant to the U.S., the use of incentives and competition in the day-to-day running of public agencies that far outstrip halfway measures such as those promoted at the time by Vice-President Al Gore. As Richard Norman of Victoria University of Wellington has written,

A large, bureaucratic public service had been reshaped using the principles of ‘New Public Management (NPM).. its elements include disggregation, or the splitting up of large public sector hierarchies into ‘business’ units with flatter hierarchies and carefully defined goals and targets; competition, as an alternative to hierarchical decision making, to put pressure on organizations to perform. Policy and funding roles were separated so these could define expectations for delivery functions and contract with private sector or non-profit providers as well as public organizations; incentivization– a move away from public service based on a life-time career and professional ethos, to contracts and rewards for specific roles. This had been most strongly emphasized by a change from ‘permanent heads’ to chief executives on time limited contracts with provision for performance bonuses.

In other words, the public service in New Zealand is akin to Harvard’s “every tub on its own bottom” system, held to account for its performance and asked to manage its own budget. In both New Zealand and Australia, what would be radical in the U.S. is now conventional. For instance, the famous tram system of Melbourne has been contracted out to private vendors—who are not even Australian—to operate. Contracting out for services is the norm in much of the New Zealand government, which understands the difference articulated in the U.S. by Steve Goldsmith during his tenure as mayor of Indianapolis between setting policy and delivering services.

One wishes for similar creativity extending, say, to mass transit in New York, and such innovation might well have been the price of maintaining the New Zealand welfare state. Is this a bargain worth considering here in America?

Howard Husock is the Vice President of Programs and the Director of the Manhattan Institute's Social Entrepreneurship Initiative. He was formerly the director of case studies in public policy and management at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government.

Now and then a tale of true irony comes across my transom.  One such tale arrived in this morning’s San Francisco Chronicle, courtesy of columnists Matier & Ross. 
 
Fans of either football or stadium construction may know that our municipal government had a bit of a falling out with our local NFL franchise late last year. In November 2006, the San Francisco 49ers announced that negotiations over a new stadium site in San Francisco had failed, and that they would move the team to Santa Clara in 2012 (that’s about 40 miles away, just northwest of San Jose for non-locals).  They selected a stadium site between Paramount’s Great America amusement park and the Santa Clara Convention Center.  Needless to say, San Franciscans were not pleased.
 
Here’s where the irony starts.  It turns out that running across the entire length of the proposed stadium site—just beyond where the southern end zone would be—an 80-foot wide water right-of-way houses a pipeline carrying water from the Sierras to the Bay Area.  As part of the Hetch Hetchy system, it is a critical link in the water supply serving about 2.4 million urbanites and suburbanites.  It also falls under the ownership of the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, an agency of San Francisco.  (Disclaimer: San Francisco is both a city and a county.  I am uncertain whether the PUC is a city or county agency.  If pressed, I would guess “county,” but I am entirely certain that the answer is irrelevant for present purposes). 

Under normal circumstances, that would be ironic enough.  In the words of one anonymous official, it is "unbelievable leverage for us. It's quite remarkable.''  In fact, it’s a Hail Mary play in the making.
 
There's another level to the irony, though, that, to the best of my knowledge, has yet to be explored.  Suppose that, rather than the SFPUC, some private entity owned that right-of-way. Clearly, the 49ers' asserted interest in the site would raise its value, and that owner would be able to negotiate a better price.  Suppose further, though, that the private owner in question was a football fan intent upon keeping the San Francisco 49ers in San Francisco.  Such an owner might refuse to sell at any price, effectively foreclosing the site from stadium construction and sending the team scurrying back—if not to San Francisco, then at least to somewhere other than Santa Clara.
 
It seems likely that the Santa Clarans who had cheered the team’s announced move might be displeased.  Fortunately, given the Supreme Court’s ruling in Kelo v. New London, and California’s recent rejection of Prop. 90—which would have repudiated Kelo, among other things —Santa Clara would have had an easy recourse. 

In the Kelo decision, the Supreme Court announced that there are no effective limits on eminent domain.  Any time that a municipal government announces that it has found a “public use” for private property, the municipality may simply seize the property in exchange for “just compensation.”  In Suzette Kelo’s case, the “public use” was development of the New London waterfront in an attempt to increase the town’s tax base.  It’s a pretty safe bet that building a stadium to attract an NFL franchise would cross this relatively low hurdle.  (Don’t worry too much about the water; I’m sure that the pipe can run beneath a stadium quite happily).
 
As a result, no private owner could interfere with the best laid plans of Santa Clarans and 49ers.  But how about a government agency—and in particular, an agency of a municipality scorned?  Can one municipality confiscate land within its own borders if the owner is a sister municipality? 
 
Maybe it’s just me.  Maybe I would find this story less amusing if I were a football fan; if I didn’t care about eminent domain; or if I understood why municipalities happily whore themselves to private businesses that happen to be sports franchises.  But from where I’m sitting, the fun is just beginning.

Bruce Abramson is the President of Informationism, Inc., a San Francisco-based consultancy. He blogs at The Informationist.

The urban silliness quotient hit a new high this week with the Times’ breathless story on Sunday about cities competing with “hipness” to attract the young. The peg for this oft-repeated tale of surging urbanism was a self-serving release by the Atlanta Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce that crowed about how in the last census their city ranked first in attracting 25- to 34-year-old educated people.

If this shtick sounds familiar, it should be. It’s the same “creative class” mantra that has mesmerized city policy makers from coast to coast. The key factor in “creative class” theory, concocted by academic Richard Florida, is that if you are hip, cool and “tolerant,” at least to people with the right liberal social views, your city will flourish.

Reporters, urban developers, gay activists and arts foundations naturally love this idea. Sometime they use it to push their agenda—not necessarily with Dr. Florida’s endorsement—for such things as new publicly financed arts venues, subsidized lofts, restaurants, clubs and street festivals.

Yet depressingly few have considered the evidence about whether the theory actually works. Many of the cities that have long been at the top of the “creative class” list of “cool cities”—San Francisco and Boston, for example—have over the past five years had among the most sluggish rates of economic growth.

Other municipalities that have swallowed the creative class kool aid, such as those embracing Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm’s “cool cities” initiative in that beleaguered state, have fared even worse. Another disaster spot is Baltimore, where mayor (and newly elected Maryland governor), Martin O’Malley’s efforts to create coolness have left the city ranked among the absolutely worst places to Live in America. Meanwhile, New Orleans, perhaps America’s hippest city, has emerged as the ultimate poster child of urban dysfunction.

Nor does it appear that these centers of hipness have done all that well in attracting and retaining young people, particularly since the collapse of the dot com bubble in 2000. Instead, people in their 20s and 30s, according to the census’ American Community Survey, appear to be heading to the places that have been creating jobs, such as Orlando, Houston, Dallas and, to a surprising extent, Southern California, including Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino counties.

This is the dirty little secret about “talent”: it revolves mostly around the economy . In the late 1990s Portland, Seattle, San Francisco, New York and Boston, all “hip and cool” cities , did enjoy rapid high end job growth. Since then, migration trends have cooled off in New York, San Francisco and Boston, although no doubt some of the super-educated, most elite young people still head to these places. Seattle and Portland metros appear to be doing better among the broader ranks, although it appears most of the growth is taking place in the surrounding suburbs rather than in the urban core.

This leads us back to Atlanta, a strange place to identify with some sort of hip-cool urban renaissance. Atlanta is one of the most suburbanized regions in the country; barely one out of every ten residents in the region live in the city, much of which is poor. Virtually all the job growth there has been in surrounding suburbs.

There also are reasons to be skeptical about the extent of the Times’ claims of Atlanta’s inner city “comeback.” The downtown’s office vacancy rate is now roughly twenty percent, among the highest in the nation. Several big companies—including Bell South, Scientific Atlanta and Georgia Pacific—have all been acquired, and now Delta, the key to the city’s cornerstone as a transport hub, is on the block. Its headquarters could seen be shifted to Phoenix, the base of potential purchaser US Airways.

Amidst all this, the much ballyhooed downtown condo building boom may be busting. A recent report on WXIA Television there revealed that one condo tower has started auctioning off units, not a good sign in a city where there are already 9,000 condos on the market and plans for another 17,000.

In the 1990s and early 2000s Atlanta’s appeal to young people was no doubt real, but much of it consisted not of young “cools” moving to the urban core. Instead it was a booming economy that drove the migration of the educated to the region—and most of them went to suburbs.

This became peculiarly evident when the Atlanta Opera decided to move to the massive new auditorium at the Cobb Galleria in the suburbs. Cobb has a booming economy that attracts companies, and young professionals who, by the time they get into their 30s, may be more interested in economic opportunity, a single family house and procreation than remaining “hip and cool” urbanites.

Perhaps city officials elsewhere should look more closely, not only at the realities of the “Atlanta model” but also at what is happening across the country. It’s the economy and things like efficient administration, reasonable levels of taxation and most of all job growth that create the preconditions for educated migration, whether in boomtowns like Houston, Phoenix, Orlando, Fargo, Charlotte or, for that matter, suburban Atlanta.

Joel Kotkin is an Irvine Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation, and the author of numerous books on citys, most recently The City: A Global History.

When I first visited Delhi little more than a decade ago it taught me to value the customs and laws and habits that are the norm in most Western cities and that are essential for urban life to be bearable.

Back in 1994, New York still had some way to go in terms of Mayor Giuliani’s civility reforms. But it was at least a place where traffic lights were more than a joke, where public monuments did not double as public latrines, where the police made most of their income from salaries rather than bribes.

Delhi on the other hand was a city whose abject third world-ness was proclaimed by, among other things, its failure to establish the elementary divide between rural and urban: scrawny cows, pigs, and feral dogs foraged in trash-filled gutters. Though it boasted scores of beautiful public buildings and graceful Lutyens bungalows, many of them were in a state of advanced decay. The streets pungently illustrated the wisdom of the old Western parental admonition: “don’t just throw your trash out the window – just imagine if everybody did that…”

As if barely controlled semi-rural chaos and environmental cluelessness weren’t bad enough, Delhi was also a showcase for the sclerotic effects of bureaucratic socialism and endemic official corruption. It groaned under the weight of mass migration from the countryside. And its failure to provide basic amenities to at least half its population illustrated the complacency of a ruling elite still puffed with post-colonial self-righteousness.

Twelve years on Delhi is, if not a new city, a remarkably transformed one. Despite a vastly greater and growing population it is in many ways more orderly, pleasant and civil.

Although it is still polluted with smoky fogs that descend when the weather cools, the air is much, cleaner than it was a decade ago. This is thanks to a court ruling that forced the Delhi Municipality to enforce long-ignored pollution laws and ban the use of diesel in public transport. All the buzzing auto-rickshaws, Ambassador taxis and packed city buses (each charmingly emblazoned with “stage carriage”) now use clean compressed natural gas.

Motorists now wear seatbelts and generally obey traffic lights at least during daylight hours. Drivers of scooters and motorbikes wear helmets (though the law requiring this does not extend to pillion passengers, and it is common to see whole families of four on a single scooter, the helmetless wife sitting sidesaddle and two bareheaded children held tightly between her and her well-protected husband.) New flyovers have eased traffic flow despite the doubling and trippling of the city’s privately owned automobiles. And a new subway system that will connect the Cities spreading suburbs to the center has opened its first stations, the project overseen by a former New York City Transit official.

Official India’s turn from socialism and protectionism has created an environment that allows advertisers for new products like cellphones, cable TV and life insurance to sponsor traffic dividers, sidewalk trees, and street furniture like bus-stops and public latrines. The ads and their mountings on fenced trees ands carefully tended traffic islands are sometimes crass but they seem a worthwhile price to pay for order and greenery.

It is true that what V.S. Naipaul brilliantly identified as India’s tragic lack of civic sense continues to plague the subcontinent, along with official corruption and a general cultural aversion to to the idea of maintenance. Yes, the relentless hooting of car horns puts Mexico City to shame. Yes the begging, public spitting, urination and even defecation take some getting used to.

But the increasingly prosperous middle classes in the city’s residential “colonies” are beginning to band together and demand the kind of efficient services – like uninterrupted electricity and water -- traditionally provided only to the elite neighborhoods where ministers and top officials have their homes. They have formed Residents Welfare Associations to put pressure on the city bureaucracies. In some cases these “RWA”s, act like New York’s BIDs organizing and paying for tasks like park maintenance and trash collection. It might be premature to say so but the emergence of the RWAs resembles in some ways the flowering of civic reformist organizations that changed the face of Victorian England.

You can see manifestations of a growing civic pride all over the place. The parks are noticeably tidier. The airport which once greeted shocked visitors to India with a riotous scrum of cabbies, porters and touts, is now a relatively orderly if charmless place. There are fewer shanty-town slums (though rather than prevent their formation, the city has an unpleasant habit of clearing these with bulldozers in the middle of the night, sometimes burying residents alive).

Some of these benign changes reflect the increasing political and cultural influence here of the South Asian diaspora (many “non-resident Indians” come back to the Mother country as investors). The growing number of Indians who have been educated in the United States, and the foreign businesspeople who have flooded in since India began to open its markets and media to the outside world, have also demanded better service public and private.

Perhaps the most encouraging sign of all is the way the Indian press, which once refused to be critical in any way of any problem in India which could not be blamed on foreigners, now covers urban blight with real gusto. Star columnists regularly inveigh against chaos and filth. And they do so in the expectation that things can get better. And the odds are that they will.

Jonathan Foreman is a journalist living in London.