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Even the creation of inner-city enterprise zones, in which businesses would receive tax breaks and other incentives, may not be enough to draw employers into the dangerous world of drugs and violent crime that chronic poverty has created. After the Watts riots of 1965, Howard Allen, senior board member of Southern California Edison, was active in trying to lure manufacturing to the inner city. This time he is more pessimistic. To him it seems that the obstacles to attracting job-creating enterprises are more firmly entrenched than they were 25 years ago. Says Allen: "We are heading...
...Florio learned the hard way, if you bump up too hard against suburban interests, you can quickly go from popular Governor to political chump. Two years ago, the New Jersey Supreme Court directed the state to reduce disparities in school funding between affluent suburban communities and inner cities. In an attempt to comply with the court order, Florio pushed the Democratic-controlled legislature to agree to $2.8 billion in new taxes, including an increase in sales tax from 6% to 7%, along with deep cuts in state jobs and spending programs. He also redirected a portion of state education...
...lesson of New Jersey is that even suburbanites who recognize the dimension of the inner-city problems often draw the line at paying to solve them. "It does not make sense to take the money away from good suburban schools so that you risk mediocrity everywhere," says Susan Bass Levin, mayor of the wealthy suburb of Cherry Hill, which is outside Camden. As a result of Florio's plan, she claims, her town lost $5 million in education funds in 1989. The following year Cherry Hill adopted the first in a series of annual school-tax hikes to offset...
Ironically, suburbanites who bristle at the thought of federal or state dollars going to support inner cities can spend like liberals on a spree when their own communities stand to benefit. In recent years the voters of Georgia's Gwinnett County, a mostly white, Republican enclave outside Atlanta, have approved road and library bond issues, as well as a special recreation tax and a 1% local sales tax to finance roads, a new courthouse and a jail...
...first suburbs to feel the strain are often located on the outskirts of spreading cities. In Hennepin County, just outside Minneapolis, Minnesota, some social-service agencies have doubled and tripled their caseloads in recent years. "The first-ring suburbs are starting to reflect what we saw in inner cities 10 to 20 years ago," says Patty Wilder, executive director of the Northwest Hennepin Human Services Council...