UNITED STATES: Who Speaks for the Cities?

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

NEW YORK, Sep 6 1996 (IPS) - Another election year, another dismal period of silence about the fate of U.S. cities.

That, at least, is the assessment of many urban experts after last month’s Republican and Democratic party conventions in which urban affairs were scarcely mentioned.

They claim that President Bill Clinton and his Republican rival, Robert Dole, are just the latest in a series of presidential candidates to prepare for elections by playing to suburban voters while all but ignoring the plight of the cities.

“Neither party is talking much about American cities,” says Bob Hickey, co-director of the Campaign for America’s Future, a Washington-based think tank. “Both have believed that the suburbs are where the votes are.”

Yet the cities cannot be ignored, some urban experts contend. “For the past three decades, the inner cities have been suffering through another Great Depression,” says Max Stamper, spokesman for the National Urban League, referring to the decade-long collapse of the U.S. economy that began in 1929.

In many central cities, such as New York’s Harlem neighbourhood, Chicago’s “South Side,” or central Brooklyn, unemployment rates are as high as 70 percent — compared to a national rate of just over 5 percent.

Some recent studies contend that the urban job crisis will not heal quickly, because job seekers outstrip job openings by rates as high as six to one in Chicago, and nine to one in East St. Louis.

Those statistics feed the national welfare crisis, as The Washington Post noted in July when it asked, following a recent study by the Maryland Department of Human Resources, “How do you get more than 79,000 people off the dole and into the workplace when you have fewer than 5,700 jobs to offer them?”

Both parties, Stamper argues, have failed to address the massive unemployment — and accompanying blights like crime and urban decay — that mark modern-day urban centres.

The only exception to the general silence on cities, he adds, comes from politicians, ranging from Republican Vice Presidential nominee Jack Kemp to Democratic Representative Charles Rangel of New York, who talk about urban “enterprise zones.”

Kemp for years has championed the idea that, by offering low taxes in impoverished inner-city zones, the government can devise a conservative, business-centred solution to urban unemployment. Rangel and many liberal Democrats have touted the similar concept of “opportunity zones” which are also designed to maximise the private sector’s role in urban renewal.

Despite decades of Democratic dominance of inner-city elections, it has actually been Kemp, rather than Clinton or Vice President Al Gore, who has taken to campaigning in urban centres and wooing urban voters.

“If both parties are competing for every vote, it will be better for the black community, the Hispanic community, the inner- city community,” Kemp told an audience in the South-Central ghetto of Los Angeles last month. “I am going to tell you, with all my heart, that we want to win your vote.”

Yet Kemp’s vision of urban empowerment remains largely restricted to enterprise zones and some federal financial help to first-time home-owners. “It’s a subsidised business attitude, at best,” Hickey says. But he credits the candidate for at least bringing cities into the campaign debate.

By contrast, Gore listed the Clinton administration’s accomplishments to his party’s convention in Chicago last week and could only come up with one that was urban-specific: “Empowerment zones bringing neighbourhoods back to life.”

The enterprise zone concept may not offer as much to cities as its advocates claim, Hickey argues. The zones often attract only low-wage jobs, Hickey says.

But he adds that urban politicians like Rangel have been drawn to the concept mainly “because it’s the only thing they have been offered.”

That focus has come in for abuse. Joyce Purnick, a columnist for the New York Times, wrote this week that “the Republicans and Democrats barely mentioned the word ‘city’ at their national conventions, unless accompanied by the dubious concept of enterprise and empowerment zones.”

Yet even that limited debate is the first sign of a national discussion on the fate of cities in many years. Most recent elections have sidestepped cities entirely, with Democrats ever- sure of gaining the bulk of most black and Latino residents, and Republicans pitching their campaigns mainly to white, suburban voters.

That equation has shifted in recent years as the two largest U.S. cities, New York and Los Angeles, both replaced black Democratic mayors with white Republicans. With strong anti-crime pitches, New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan have demonstrated that the Democrats can no longer take the urban vote for granted.

But Doug Henwood, editor of ‘The Left Business Observer,’ does not see it quite that way, however. Instead, he argues that those recent elections suggest that urban residents may be turned off by both major parties.

“Both parties are just less meaningful for people in cities,” Henwood says. “The Democrats have failed miserably in running big cities, which have deteriorated in every way.”

As a result, Hickey says, Bill Clinton may be surprised if he assumes that traditional Republican distaste for minorities, immigrants and other urban residents will guarantee a heavy urban vote once more for the Democrats. “I think there’s an equal chance people will just stay home,” he says.