I’m not going to respond Hughes’ vision in any detail here as it would take a small book. Everything I’ve written on city politics and policy in the last four years—which amounts to s small book–is a response. I’m just going to sum up those arguments. (I’ll put in links from this summary essay to the essays where I discuss ideas in detail as I rebuild this blog.)
In 2007 we had a debate at YPP about whether it is more important to help the population in the city or to bring more middle class people back to the city. Hughes is, I suppose one alternative. And some of the supporters of Chaka Fattah–not the Congressman himself–was the other. I’ve always thought that the answer is to reject both alternatives.
Our goal should be to find a strategy to revive our city while also addressing issues of poverty and class. That is, there We need public policies that, at the same time serve serve poor, working people and middle class people in our cities. While there may be a number of ways to accomplish that beyond those I consider below, all of the ones that make sense to me aim to find ways both to bring the middle class back to our cities as a way not of displacing poor and working people but as a way of creating economicallly and racially integrated neighborhoods that help poor and working people rise into the middle class.
Where Hughes is right and why he is fundamentally wrong
Mark Alan Hughes is not totally wrong. The burden of caring for the poor is expensive. Ending poverty is beyond the capacity of the resources of city to accomplish.
But while we can’t do enough to end poverty, we can do a great deal to improve the lives of both working people and the poor in this city.
And we have to do so because, pace Hughes, the city can’t survive with a happy 500,000 and miserable million.
1. For every professional and managerial job in this city, we need support staff. And much of this staff needs real education. We need administrative assistants and technicians and clerks and nurses aids. If we don’t educate the children of the miserable million, we won’t have the workforce we need.
2. Similarly, if we don’t provide housing for the support staff our professionals and managers city needs, as well as the lesser skilled people who work as waiters and bellhops and maids and orderlies and janitors we will limit our potential for growth. Some progressive worry that American cities will soon become like European cities with our working class removed to the suburbs. To some extent this is happening as some of the older suburbs become poorer and come to have the problems we associate with cities. But all those barriers that the suburbs created to stop poor and working class people moving there still remain in place. So long as public transit into the city is limited and expensive, and zoning codes make it too expensive to build affordable housing in the suburbs, a big part of the city’s lower income work force is going to have to live in the city.
So how do we create public policies that benefit everyone in the city? And how do we find the resources to pay for those policies.
They key to answering that question is to take seriously the work of Michael Porter who pointed out over twenty years ago that while the residents of working class neighborhoods in our cities have low incomes, they also live in densely packed communities. And taken together, those densely packed communities have the economic wherewithal to support thriving commercial areas.
Indeed right now, their economic resources support all the shopping centers and strip malls on the edge of the city, because, with the failure of commercial districts in the city, that’s where people in our working class neighborhoods have to shop. As Porter and others pointed out, a great deal of the businesses found in our cities, and especially our retail businesses, cannot simply leave the area. They are, in the contemporary jargon, place-based. And so the question is, which place will they be in, the city or its near suburbs.
From this perspective, the great flight of businesses from city to suburbs was, in fact, irrational where it was not created by government policies such as redlining. It was, in large part, racist response to the changing population of center cities and a fearful response to the threat of being the “last one left.”
And, with the right kind of government support and subsidy to our commercial districts, the commercial corridors can be rehabilitated. If we replace the government disinvestment of the last forty years with selective, targeted investment we will find the private investment will follow.
This strategy of reinvesting in the commercial life of the city is the beginning of an alternative to Hughes’ decoupling strategy. It is the key element because it shows us how by selective investment, we can generate within the city the resources we need to accomplish some of what Hughes thinks we cannot accomplish. There are other key elements, including:
1. Using selective investments in public transit to strengthen commercial corridors, to make it easier for working people to get to work and to more neighborhoods attractive to the middle class.
2. Using effective crime fighting strategies to diminish the crime tax on our economic life and to enable us to ultimately shift resources from our criminal justice system to other better uses. (Interestingly enough, Hughes does think this is possible.)
3. Developing a community organizing strategy to improve the quality of life in the vast majority of blocks in our working class neighborhoods that are mostly livable today. Such a strategy would also be used to sustain and improve many of the expensive public amenities such as libraries and recreation centers.
4. Taking advantage of the gentrifying impulse—and the community organizing strategy—not to push working people out of the neighborhoods they have lived for generations but to create new economically and racially integrated neighborhoods. Inclusionary housing is one public policy that can help make that happen.
5. And taking advantage of all these developments—reduced crime, commercial redevelopment and job growth, and civic volunteerism—to convince our children that they have a bright future and that the path to that future is in education. Of course we need more resources for our schools and it will take time to find them. But more than that, I believe we need to overcome the sense in too many of our kids that they have no future worth being educated for. And that is something the schools can’t do. It will take a broader revival of our civic spirit to accomplish it.
I have just sketched an ambitious counter-strategy to the decoupling strategy presented by Hughes. And I’ve only scratched the surface in discussing these issues. But while this is ambitious, there is nothing strikingly original here. There is nothing that hasn’t been tried and been successful in other parts of the country, and even more in Europe, over the last twenty years.
And where it has worked, it has done so in very difficult political conditions, with a federal government that is de-funding the cities and stifling innovation.
How do we pay for this strategy? Right now it is pretty tough. But we did pass a $100 million bond issue for commercial corridors last year. If we leverage that money right so that it can be matched by state, federal, and private money, it will make a difference. I would argue that further bond issues for these purposes would make sense as well.
We’ve already passed half of an inclusionary housing bill. But we are still waiting for the incentive portion to be passed and need, in my view, to modify the bill so that it is better suited to the strategy of sharing the benefits of gentrification.
We have to tax a lot smarter, starting by shifting to a land tax, and adopting some of the other tax ideas Stan Shaprio and others have been putting forward recently.
And we have to prepare for more help from the federal government.
We have just elected a President who promises to reverse federal disinvestment in our cities. We will soon have a chief executive who has been a community organizer, who knows both the travails of cities and their potential, and who has created a movement that, if we were to capture it in Philadelphia, could change they way we do things and make possible things that some of us only dreamed about two years ago.
There will be more money for cities in general, for urban rehabilitation and for transit. Are we in Philadelphia preparing now to make use of that money? Are we developing plans for commercial corridor rehabilitation and for transit expansion? Not like we should be.
So this is not the time for us to give up on two-thirds of our city. It is the time to fight for the whole city. A politics of hope is finally about to arrive in Washington. Yet in Philadelphia, the city that invented hope, it’s hard to find it right now, despite the best efforts of many of us to help create a sense of possibility and hope.
But maybe its just a waiting to be born.