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Cities, Heal Thyselves
Originally appeared in Newsweek
on
July 5, 1993.
The nation's mayors gathered in New York last week and tried to make the best
of their bad situation, which represented a significant change in strategy.
Usually, they just complain. But the futility of complaint has become obvious:
there will be no significant help for them from Washington, feels their pain and
-- more to the point -- probably couldn't have been elected without their
support. Bill Clinton's inability to sell his modest urban-stimulus package was
galling and no doubt the result of presidential incompetence as much as
congressional sentiment -- but a significant wake-up call nonetheless. As a
result, the mayors have begun to emphasize a curious new strategy: triage.
They'd still love to get more money from the Feds, but, barring that, they're
asking for less burdensome governance -- for relief from costly federal
requirements, fewer "unfunded mandates" like clean-air regulations. "The fiscal
crisis in the cities," said their new president, Jerry Abramson of Louisville,
"is largely a result of unfunded federal mandates." Several of his colleagues
went on, passionately, about the burdens imposed by the Americans with
Disabilities Act -- an odd spectacle.
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 sense that neither man has really come to grips with
the desperate financial problems his city faces. (Nor, to be fair, has
Guiliani'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 PAGE 4
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. Michael 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."
Creative ways: 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 -- of 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
finance 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 Schundler --
and Schundler has something more as well: a flicker of hope, and the promise of
a new opportunity, at a moment when the best most other mayors can offer is
triage.
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