It's a new tact—instead of fighting decline, Youngstown is attempting to manage it.

Even as the population has halved to about 80,000 since 1950, the city still has the same physical footprint to maintain, and the better-off suburbs have little interest in taking on the city's neighborhoods, so the question for Mayor Jay Williams has become how to manage change. Much of this entials laying claim to abandoned properties, which can be a legally tricky business, and clearing out areas that have hemmoraghed residents. In short, creating a less dense city, especially as residents are concerned that any new housing will be for the very poor, and destabilize the city's remaining stable neighborhoods.

There's a good deal more to the city's troubles, including five prisons in the metropolitan area, a problem with organized crime, and of course the conviction of former House Rep. James "Beam Me Up" Traficant on racketeering charges.

On his grim album, the Ghost of Tom Joad, Bruce Springsteen has one song called Youngstown, about the city's decline:

From the Monongahela valley
To the Mesabi iron range
To the coal mines of Appalachia
The story's always the same
Seven hundred tons of metal a day
Now sir you tell me the world's changed
Once I made you rich enough
Rich enough to forget my name

The area is blighted, though, because its infrastructure is shot. Incredibly, the city hasn't connected most of its properties with the sewer system. In short, the mayor is threatening to use eminent domain to force out business owners whose properties are blighted because the city has failed to provide adequate services—and he'd do so on behalf of new private owners, who'd be expected to pay out the actual settlements to the current area residents who'd be forced to vacate.

…

The way the game of building anything of scale built in New York these days—and nearly everything that's built is aimed at the middle of the market and up—is to throw in some form or another of subsidizing housing that can be labeled affordable, which placates both the Bloomberg administration, which frequently touts the number of subsiddies units that have gone up under its watch, and the affordable housing advocates, who after 60 years of endless crisis and subsidy continue to insist that the problem could be solved if only more money were thrown at it.

There's an accidentally hilarious quote in a Times article on the plan from one such activist, who seems utterly unaware (as do the writer and whatever editors saw the piece) that there are literally no residents in the neighborhood, only businesses—

But Mercedes Narciso, a senior planner at the Pratt Center for Community Development in Brooklyn, said the proposed redevelopment “has the potential to generate growth in an equitable manner.” She said the city needed to make sure that at least half of the housing units were for people of moderate and low incomes and that the community benefited from hiring guarantees.

It appears the mayor agrees that in order to save the community, first it must be evicted, a point Jarrett Murphy made last year in this worthwhile dispatch on the area in the Village Voice.

…

To be sure, Willets Point could and ought to put much more into the city's coffers, and there's no good reason for such small-scale businesses to occupy such potentially valuable land. Why doesn't the city, then, fix the pothole-ridden roads and connect it to the sewage system? Presumably, this would attract new owners and more arguably presentable and certainly profitable businesses.

The question is the same as with affordable housing: Why not let the market work?

Anne Applebaum sees Europe, in the absence of a unifying Big Idea, becoming more like America—if there's no job in Buffalo, you move to Phoenix. And "Sarkozy is the first European politician to appeal directly to these new Europeans."

Consider his speech in London earlier this year, where he called it a "town that seems more and more prosperous and dynamic every time I come here," and "one of the greatest French cities," where tens thousands of Frenchmen live because "they are risk-takers, and risk is a bad word" in their homeland.

And why was Keel sharing this information by confronting a man in a shark suit in the middle of a press conference? Surely, to maintain the dignity of this election.

It gets better. Keel also claimed the man behind the shark mask is a member of the Pagans motorocycle gang, a member of the electricians' rivals in the carpenters union and, most stunning, from New Jersey.

One blogger has an excellent summary—"Basically, the mayor's race today has now included references to the following: An anthropomorphic shark, the Pagans, $500 under the table payments, thugs and a mysterious gray van following the shark mascot's handler. I love Philadelphia."

Here's the audio, filled with lines considered but rejected for a second-rate noir. It begins with the shark's talking friend going after Knox and claiming he's been harassed by shady union characters while innocently smoking cigars outside of his apartment, and really gets going once Keel shows up at about the four minute mark. Keep in mind there's a man standing in a shark suit as all this goes on, and that once Keel asks him to take off the mask, the reporters are holding microphones up to the shark.

Doctoroff had a very different take on the impact the of the $21 fee for trucks to enter the city between 6 pm and 6 am than what we wrote earlier this week. He expects the fee to have a minimal effect on number of trucks in the city during the day, mostly because tolls are deducted from the fee, meaning it will cost most trucks little if anything to enter Manhattan. Instead, he thinks this element of the plan will mostly help reduce traffic in Long Island City (in Queens) and Downtown Brooklyn, where trucks go out of their way to take untolled routes to the city, creating oft-times huge delays at the crossings. It's an interesting idea, though we're still not convinced that functionally replacing all Manhattan tolls with a flat price for entering the city, regardless of route (at least during the congestion pricing hours) makes much sense at all. We'll see, though, if the administration can sell this logic to the outer boroughs.

The similarities go beyond policy.  Sarkozy is running not only against the Socialists, but against his own President Jacques Chirac.  Without mention Chirac by name, Sarkozy has called for reversing the economic policies associated with his presidency.  If Giuliani wins the GOP nod in 08, he will similarly have to distance himself from the Bush foreign policy legacy without directly criticizing the president.    

Still, it's hard to see a three-time losing candidate running in part on the Republican line beating any of these Democrats. But lightning does strike every so often, and it's clear that Katz who as late as Friday was blogging on the race for Philadelphia Magazine, doesn't think much of the field. In his last post, Katz called this "as listless a campaign as any I can remember… So if you’re wondering why this election has seemed as significant as a cup of warm spit, you probably need look no further than the campaigns our candidates are waging. If there were a law against political malpractice, these five would all be breaking it."

I wrote a pair of pieces very sympathetic to Katz during his last run (this one in the Weekly Standard, and this one in the Post), but in some ways the same traits that would have made him an appealing mayor are what have made him a less appealing candidate.

Back in 2003, Katz's team gave me a good number of press releases and research paper pertaining to voter fraud, with some very striking allegations, including one district that consistently produced more votes than it contained voters. That tidbit was somewhere around page 40 of the paper it was in. I can't imagine many reporters waded that far in. I bring this up only because the campaign in some ways seemed to be built—and built well—for governing, with the candidate and his team offering analysis and ideas that were serious and substantial, but frequently none-too-sexy. To riff on Mario Cuomo, it seemed to me that Katz was campaigning in prose.

My sense at the time was that Katz had the stuff to make a very good mayor, but that while hard-working, he was a less than compelling candidate. If he does enter this race, though, it would mean that he'd be running against a candidate most primary voters had opposed, and he'd have nearly six months to redefine himself and his narrative.

Still, there's little downside I can see for the city in a Katz run. At the least, it would make for the more substantial, serious and focused campaign that the city badly needs, and is yet to have.

Drudge has yet another headline today linking to a story on the city's skyrocketing murder rate, which is up to one a day (put another way, more murders than New York City, with one-sixth the population), while the mayor, the Philadelphia Daily News, the New York Times and several of the candidates prefer to blame gun control laws, the economy, demographics, and other factors outside of the city's control. The city needs to come to terms with its problems, and Katz running a reasonably competive general election challenge should help make that happen, and do a fair amount to draw members of the electorate past Democratic primary voters into the conversation.

While the plan fits neatly into the mayor's pattern of targeting behaviors with hidden social costs, as with his cigarette tax hike and partially hydrogenated oil ban, it seems odd to introduce a big idea that the state must approve—and will do so, if at all, only after much kicking and screaming—just a year and a half before leaving office, especially as it pushes mayoral candidates of good will to stake out contrary positions in the quest for outer borough votes. Then again, the timing makes a lot more sense if considered in terms of Bloomberg's still not ruled-out run for the presidency.

Meanwhile, the plan so far as we've seen it seems to be largely modeled on London's, and to be over-broad in its present shape. That the price would be the same throughout the day, instead of shifting with demand, seems needlessly inelegant. And by discounting tolls entirely from the $8 fee, he eliminates the incentive not to use these roads, which until now have represented an important resources to outer borough people willing to pay a price to enter the city quickly, or at least less slowly. Even as he's trying to rationalize pricing within Manhattan, that is, he's making pricing entering Manhattan less sensible.

We also hoped that a congestion pricing scheme might particularly go after the cabs and trucks that generate a great deal of the island's traffic, chaos, din, smog and snarl. For instance, charging trucks a high fee for entering the city during certain hours, or reducing the number of cabs on the street by reforming the corrupt medallion system would both have as great an impact on traffic as the mayor's necessarily regressive plan, which mostly goes after the civilian drivers, as it were, and not the pros. [Red-faced update-the mayor's plan charges trucks $21 to enter Manhattan during extended business hours.]

Still, this is no easy political lift, and a plan in need of refinement is superior to a continuation of what all parties agree is an untenable status quo.

That still left Spitzer's approval rating at over 55 percent, and having already taken the hit, the new governor had every reason to reap the rewards for doing the right thing. Instead, he became suddenly concerned with passing an on-time budget, which he'd previously claimed wouldn't be a priority, and mostly capitulated on out-of-control spending on Medicaid and throughout the budget. Given his nearly 70% approval rating upon taking office, it's unlikely he'll ever again have more political capital than he's just squandered. Given what he'd committed to getting things right in his first 100 days (the mantra was, "On Day One, everything changes") It's the equivalent of folding a $50 pot to a 50 cent bet.

Whatever his reasons for backing down, Spitzer's come out of his first real fight with his reputation damaged. Still, he's got at least three and likely seven years to turn things around, and has something of a track record of doing so. Few still remember that he'd originally intended to make his name as A.G. on gun control, and it was only after suffering several embarrassing defeats on this front that he set his sights on Wall Street, and established the reputation as "Sheriff of Wall Street" that he leveraged into the governorship.

For all the fuss about Medicaid fraud, which according to the New York Times may cost billions, though, the real issue is willful waste. Spending on the program exploded under Governor Pataki, mostly owing to a unique funding formula in which the state split its share of Medicaid costs with the counties, and so came to see dollars spent on the program as nearly free money, since each dollar so spent generated one from a county, and two from the federal government. The result has been a health care system that does triple duty as a political power base and as a incredibly inefficient job subsidy. It's also resulted in a politically potent union that gains more power over the state government each time that same government ensures its income and membership increases, making reform that much more difficult with each year's new spending spike.

All this was brought to mind, but the undue focus on fraud, which has became an issue largely owing to the Times dispatch, which generated national headlines, its potential efficacy as a campaign issue for Spitzer's opponents. The Times has continued on the fraud beat, with a new A1 dispatch (also picked up by Drudge) on the $50 million New York spends on just 500 addicts who continually enroll in Medicaid-sponsored rehab programs.

To be sure, it's crucial to pick such low-lying fruit, but this coverage seems to come at the expense of any broader look at how New York ended up spending so much more per person on Medicaid than any other large state, with no discernible improvement to the quality of healthcare. The focus on fraud has conveniently kept attention from the larger issue of the program's profound and purposeful inefficiencies. Medicaid spending is an awfully inefficient and especially inelegant way for the state to create or maintain jobs.

Spitzer has a year now to get his budget priorities in order, and there's every reason to believe that next year he'll come to the table in a weaker negotiating position than where he just was, as a new governor who'd won with an overwhelming mandate for change. Here's hoping he'll play his hand better, no matter the cards, the next time around.

—Fred Siegel in the new number of City Journal on Nat Glazer's new book and the architecture of repulsion.

—Springfield legislators seems unwilling to put their money where their mouths are for Chicago's 2016 Olympics bid.

In a hospital emergency room, a young man winces as doctors try to determine how badly he has been injured.

His name is Karim Williams, he is 27, and he is this city’s latest shooting victim. He says he was hit around 12:30 a.m. by a shot fired while he was walking from his girlfriend’s car into a bar.

…

In some ways, Mr. Williams is a typical patient at the trauma unit: young, mildly intoxicated and apparently with no idea why he was shot.

It's not until the 16th paragraph that Williams is mentioned again, when we're told that our unlucky victim "was looking for work after a past in which he served jail time for crimes including car theft and drug dealing." Our out of work ex-con's claim of being randomly shot is never held up to any questioning, though.

Rather, he's used to offer a resonant opinion on what's causing the problem: "'You’ve got to have jobs for the people that need them,' [Williams] said from his gurney. 'You have to keep people occupied. Without jobs, all you can do is resort to violence.'"

Having steered shy of Williams' background also means the article is unable to get to the heart of the matter—the extent to which these shootings result from high-crime pockets the police have been both unable and unwilling to go after, which in turn leads to still more crime, and a culture of lawlessness that's just brutal for the civilians who live in these areas.

Instead, the Times offers only two equally half-baked explanations for why the murder rate was up 22% from 2004-2006, and is on the rise again this year—lax state gun control laws state law compels the city to abide by, and poverty.

We wrote at some length about crime in Philly last week—suffice that a city with more murders than New York City and a sixth the population, and a mayor and police commissioner who prefer to blame the rise from 288 killings in 2002 to 406 last year on state laws and environmental causes they're powerless to change, is in bad need of a new direction.

The good news is that in the first Democratic mayoral debate on Saturday [video here], several of the candidates took a far more honest look at crime than the Times, or Mayor Street, has proven capable of taking.

I wrote about the bizarre, Barry-esque dynamics of the race at the time here and here. Given the buzz director Tigre Hill's film has generated (one mayor candidate has attended a screening, and another has hosted one), it's clear the issue stil resonates.

Watch the trailer >>