Troubled City Schools

This chapter focuses on city schools. City schools in the United States are failing. Evidently, school policy ought to be of central concern for those concerned with cities, since not only do nearly all children attend schools close to home, but in addition, the schools are for the most part governed and funded locally. Unless city schools are repaired, other aspects of city life will continue to slide downhill. This city-school problem, a crucial piece of urban affairs, will not be solved with city resources and city politics alone. The national government and the states need to do better budgeting, improve regulations, and provide open-minded support.

Drug-War Politics

This chapter examines drug-war politics. While many politicians have benefited from supporting the drug war, growing numbers of influential persons express opposition. While private firms may benefit handsomely from provisioning the war, state governments have become more cautious, sensitive to budgetary pressures. Among supporters for drug-law reform, nearly all endorse a policy known as harm reduction; many call for decriminalization, and growing numbers advocate legalization. Indeed, pressures for drug-law and prison-regime reforms have increased and spread since the turn of the twenty-first century. Numerous state referenda, legislative moves, and court rulings have liberalized marijuana restrictions, allowing medical prescriptions and in some cases recreational use. Legislatures have also reduced penalties for use of many drugs and have lessened some of the racial bias. Nevertheless, the drug war remains a major and damaging element of urban policy, with key supporters.

Cities as Budget-Cutting Targets

This chapter examines how presidents and governors, legislators, and top administrative officials enacted changes when pushed steadily by organized business executives to increase austerity over the past forty years. They loosened market regulations, weakened social protections, and wrote laws and cut budgets in many areas, from patent protection to immigration labor regulations to urban transit. Austerity policies then grew into a broad national assault on budgets for public services, with spending cuts and privatizations in health care, public schools, public spaces, housing, transit, the arts, and various other municipal functions. To a great extent, these policies focused on cities. As city populations declined, tax collections dropped and budgets were further cut.

Cities as Political Targets

This chapter discusses austerity, which causes significant urban damage, directly and indirectly. Austerians—especially those who make key decisions in banks, corporations, the federal administration, Congress, and the courts—sometimes have cities in mind as they make policy, but usually not. If they do make the connection, they may aim to punish cities. They surely do not regard fiscal and economic policy as part of “urban policy.” Indeed, austerity was imposed not to resolve the fiscal crisis, nor to aid financial institutions to recover their losses, nor to earmark funds for building social capital or offering services. Yet austerity policies do constitute “upstream” flows that can flood cities and swamp their options. Austerity thus needs to be incorporated into discussions and actions on urban policy.

The Paradox of Plenty

This chapter explores food and nutrition policy. To add food and nutrition as elements of urban policy breaks a supposedly natural boundary. Food and nutrition policy have long been thought to be subjects not for cities, but for departments of agriculture, health authorities, and regulators of large corporations. Yet it is highly appropriate to add food and nutrition as elements of urban policy. Indeed, food and nutrition come into the picture as one of the “external” or “upstream” urban policies in need of improvement, demanding attention to the ways nutritional deficits vary from neighborhood to neighborhood. The problem of food insecurity troubles the poorest neighborhoods.

Options for City Schools

This chapter argues that the public school crisis will continue unless the nation moves dramatically to reduce racial segregation of residential areas and to enact policies to reduce class distinctions. Equity in public schooling—a fair chance for every child—requires these changes. In the absence of actions to reduce the society's disabling racial class differences, an overall national program of school reform is called for, one that uses federal funding for economic stimulus. Such a reform would also radically rethink the nation's overall approach to public schools. Small successful American experiments suggest possibilities for such reform. Two examples stand out: special schools as parts of larger city school systems, and programs that help city children to attend suburban schools.

Democracy, Inequality, Urban Policy

This chapter argues that American cities will not prosper unless the nation takes a new approach to urban policy. Indeed, federal agencies need to augment their contributions for housing, and metropolitan areas need inter-municipal coordination. Moreover, cities need enhanced environmental protection, accelerated economic development, and protection against abrupt real estate booms and busts. However, for such improvements to occur more often and more robustly, the nation must reject austerity and, together with the cities, improve policies for schools, food, and drugs. The evidence throughout this book shows that the deprivation that afflicts cities, inner suburbs, and their poorest inhabitants is not only immoral, but also politically and economically unsustainable. It is also economically illogical, and it may even be, as mainstream conservative politicians have begun to argue, politically suicidal.

Drugs, Prisons, and Neighborhoods

This chapter focuses on the drug war. Those who enforce drug laws attack inner-city neighborhoods directly, drastically disrupting the lives of poor black and Latino residents. Cities at their best are highly productive and just, but the drug war powerfully undercuts that potential. It discourages diversity, fairness, and democracy. It also reduces social, technological, and economic innovation. Thus, solid arguments demand the inclusion of drug issues as part of urban policy. As public policy, the drug war contradicts the broad conservative push for urban austerity, while at the same time exacerbating the need for public expenditure. For decades, public spending on the drug war and closely associated prison operations has constituted a major growth industry. And yet, much like defense spending, drug-war spending is supported most strongly by those who otherwise favor austerity.

Looking Upstream

This introductory chapter presents an overview of the four “upstream” policies on austerity, schools, food, and drugs. These policies are not typically regarded as urban policies, but they ought to be. In their present forms, they damage cities; but they can be changed. Such changes have the best potential for improving cities. In each of the four areas, city advocates and researchers have produced enormous bodies of evidence calling for reform. Vast troves of annual survey data as well as solid statistical analyses come from public agencies such as the National Center for Education Statistics, the Bureau of Justice Statistics, and the Food and Nutrition Service. More information comes from various state and city research organizations, new local programs, investigative journalists, and the research reports, journal articles, and books written by hundreds of individual researchers and research teams based for the most part at colleges and universities.