Cities Heal Thyselves

And so, an era ends. The liberal reform movement that supplanted the colorful, corrupt ethnic machines in the 1950s and 1960s has run its course. The money no longer exists to fund the large centralized bureaucracies, the plush union contracts, the speculative and overly optimistic social programs. For the past 30 years, New York-to take the most egregious example-has spent too much of its resources “trying to do the things a city can’t do,” says Harvard sociologist Nathan Glazer, while it neglected “the things a city can do…When you have a $31 billion budget and can’t clean the streets, something’s wrong.”

There is no clear sense of what comes next, no immediate prospect for anything but an extended, ever-more-agonizing decline-but there are some interesting new ideas beginning to percolate. And a growing anger over the loss of the most basic amenities-public safety, clean streets, schools that work-that seems to have reached critical mass. New York could join Los Angeles in electing a Republican mayor before the year is over. But the new urban moment isn’t merely about a potential Republican takeover of the nation’s largest cities, startling as that would be. Nor is it necessarily another of the periodic Caucasian law’ n’ order uprisings that yield get-tough mayors like Ed Koch in New York and Frank Rizzo in Philadelphia and result, ultimately, in greater polarization.

Certainly, crimefighting (often a euphemism for race-bashing) is never far from the heart of urban politics, and Richard Riordan’s recent victory in Los Angeles probably would not have happened without the riots of 1992-but Riordan, however much he may emphasize the need for more cops, is no Rizzo. He cites Bill Clinton as a role model. And Rudolph Giuliani, the Republican challenger in New York, has spent the spring reaching out to Democrats and Latinos. Both talk the new, Clinton-devalued language of “reinventing” government, of “achieving liberal goals through conservative means,” as Riordan proposed last week, but one senses that neither man has really come to grips with the desperate financial problems his city faces. (Nor, to be fair, has Giuliani’s opponent, the incumbent David Dinkins, who often seems the last, best defender of the bureaucratic welfare state.)

Other mayors have. Most face the same bleak prospect: a needy, racially polarized city with a chronic budget deficit, an overstuffed bureaucracy and, yes, the necessity of providing all sorts of social programs-welfare, health care, environmental standards mandated by the federal government. There seems a growing acknowledgment about the next obvious step: the overstuffed bureaucracy will have to go.

It won’t be easy. The public-employees unions have gathered incredible power since they were allowed to bargain collectively 30 years ago. In many places-especially the older, rust-belt cities they have supplanted the ethnic machines as the most powerful political force in town, the only organizations that can produce warm bodies to lick envelopes, answer phones, go door to door. Taking on the unions will be difficult for another reason as well: government work has been the path out of poverty for much of the emerging black middle class. Still, many mayors are finding they have no choice: they have to fight city hall. “I can’t say this publicly,” says one Midwestern mayor, “but sooner or later we’re all going to have to do what Ed Rendell has done in Philadelphia.”

Rendell is quick to say that everything he has tried in Philadelphia had already been done elsewhere. Privatization of city services is nothing new–Richard Daley (the son of the real Mayor Daley) has done it so assiduously that Chicago magazine recently asked, “Is Mayor Daley Really a Republican?” Other mayors had challenged their unions and figured out creative ways to slim down their bureaucracies. But Philadelphia was such a mess, and the radical surgery Rendell performed was so dramatic. The city was, in effect, bankrupt when he was elected in 1991. He couldn’t borrow money; the city’s bonds were rated at junk levels. He couldn’t raise taxes; taxes had been raised 19 times in the past decade. Indeed, each new tax would bring a loss of revenue-more businesses and civilians would leave town. Rendell considered himself a classic liberal Democrat, but he ran for mayor promising to freeze union salaries, cut benefits, change the byzantine, paralytic work rules and-this was the real red flag-privatize some functions. “The question,” he said, tossing a football in his office several weeks ago, “is whether a corrupt, corroded, civil-service-dominated, work-rule-laden city government can reform itself”

The answer seems to be, so far, so good. The city’s budget is balanced. The municipal employees mounted a fierce campaign against Rendell, and eventually went out on strike-for 16 hours. Their new contract is tough, but hardly draconian: the number of paid days off for entry-level workers, for example, has been reduced from 52 to a mere 43. In addition to the financial concessions, Rendell won the right to actually manage the city without undue union interference. He has privatized some custodial and security services. He can also use “nontraditional” (nonunion) laborers to do city work in some instances. “The National Guard wanted to help us clean and seal crack houses, but the unions wouldn’t let them,” he says. “Now they can. We’re also using probationers to clean out the trash in vacant lots.”

Rendell’s natural, garrulous enthusiasm seems to have infected his newly invigorated city-and also his fellow mayors. Frank White in Cleveland recently won a similar battle, freezing union pay, shedding work rules and winning the right to privatize. “We refused to raise taxes,” says Paul Patton, White’s executive assistant. “The feeling was, we had to get our own house in order before we’d even think about asking the public to pay more taxes. The strategy was the same as Rendell’s.”

The events in Philadelphia, Cleveland and other cities have led to a certain, well, softening of the union position. Gerald McEntee of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) says he’s still dead set against privatization, but “there is a debate about how government can redesign and reinvent itself, and we are ready to take part in that.” In other words, he’s willing to think about trading featherbedding and antiquated work rules for a slimmer, better-paid, “empowered” (his word) union work force. This is progress, of a sort. The trouble is, even if every city were to have a Philadelphia-style reform, most would still be in deep trouble. Rendell was able to solve a financial crisis, but-and he is quite candid about this-he has little influence over the underlying social problems that are at the heart of the city’s agony: the loss of blue-collar jobs, chronic welfare dependency, crime, drug abuse, out-of-wedlock births. “I inherited a terminal cancer patient with a gunshot wound to the chest,” Rendell says. “I managed to heal the gunshot wound.”

_B_Creative ways:b How do you cure cancer? There are no known cures. There are some interesting theories, though. And at least one refreshing new practitioner: Bret Schundler, the 34-year-old mayor of Jersey City, N.J., of all places. Schundler is a Republican. He won election with 68 percent of the vote–the same as Rendell-and an interracial coalition that included many of the city’s most desperately poor. A former investment adviser, he has found creative ways–too complicated to explain here-to reorganize the city’s finances and reduce taxes. But he’s interested in more than just efficiency; he wants to fight the cancer. “The traditional liberal position was ‘You have a serious problem. Let me take care of it for you’,” he says. “This was the philosophy of entitlement, the dominant philosophy of the 20th century. Ronald Reagan’s antidote to that was ‘You take care of it yourself’-the classic conservative argument. But that doesn’t work either. We have to acknowledge that people in these communities have serious problems and need help. What we should be saying to them is ‘I want to give you the ability to take care of the problem yourself.’ This is the philosophy of empowerment.”

The philosophy is not new. Jack Kemp espoused it, using a lot more words. Bill Clinton has paid it lip service, but fudged on the details. Schundler buys into Kemp’s solutions: tenant control of housing projects and parental control of the schools (through vouchers). He differs from Kemp in the recognition-rare for a Republican-that these things cost money (he supported an increased state income tax) and in his willingness to go off the high board: Schundler is proposing a school-voucher program that directly challenges the most powerful public-employees union, the National Education Association. “There has to be a real revolution,” he says. Rendell-style reforms are not enough. “Getting the union to change work rules is sort of like having the American Revolution and then settling for lifting all the oppressive taxes, but allowing King George to remain in power. You’ve spent all your energy, but the corrupt system is still in place and the union can win it all back from the next politician who comes along.”

For his part, Rendell thinks the “empowerment” strategy is marginal. “Anything that gives people a stake in their own destinies can’t hurt,” he says, but the heart of the problem is the disappearance of meaningful low-skill jobs, and racism, and the self-destructive behavior of those poor people so hopeless that they refuse to be “empowered.” He has a point. But so does Schundlerand Schundler has something more as well: a flicker of hope, and the promise of new opportunity, at a moment when the best most other mayors can offer is triage.

title: “Cities Heal Thyselves” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-28” author: “Janice Lail”