Word: urban
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Perhaps the biggest gripe among residents is that Guyton's ghetto gallery will push economic development away from Heidelberg Street. To be sure, the community has been an urban wasteland, a place where crime, drugs and vagrancy flourish in buildings still charred and hollowed from the 1967 riots. But a fledgling enterprise zone has sparked hope that new housing, businesses and jobs will flow into the area. Thus Guyton's suggestion that the street be turned into an artists' colony has generated little enthusiasm. "It is an embarrassing eyesore," fumes neighbor Anthony Dicus. "Nobody will want to invest here...
...storefront offices offering everything from Medicaid-funded health care for the homebound to city-sponsored psychosocial services for the mentally ill. Flake, who this month announced that he is leaving Congress to devote himself full-time to his church job, says Allen A.M.E. has "taken an urban community that by the press's definition was blighted and turned it around. The best role for government is to be a partner in that process...
...driving force behind this fresh approach to urban government is a handful of "new pragmatist" mayors--Indianapolis' Goldsmith, Cleveland's Michael White, Philadelphia's Edward Rendell, Milwaukee's John Norquist, Chicago's Richard M. Daley and to some extent Los Angeles' Robert Riordan and New York City's Rudolph Giuliani--who actively collaborate and compare notes on how to make cities work. Goldsmith visits Giuliani every few months to talk shop; Rendell and Goldsmith bounce ideas off each other at frequent joint speaking appearances. And good practices, big or small, travel fast. "You learn a lot from each other," says...
...pragmatism is at least partly a response to economic necessity. Mayors are operating in an age of sharply limited resources. Federal aid to cities has fallen sharply in the past 20 years, and urban tax bases have eroded as businesses and affluent residents have fled to the suburbs. Since the mid-1970s, when New York and other big cities teetered on the brink of bankruptcy, mayors have had to work hard just to stay afloat: they literally can no longer afford to preside over bloated bureaucracies or coddle unions at contract time. "There's just a different set of problems...
Other cities may boast of innovative, hard-bargaining mayors, but at least one urban center is clattering along in just the opposite direction. Beset by financial woes, high crime and decaying city services, Washington has now suffered the indignity of having its mayor, Marion S. Barry, stripped of nearly all power. As part of a $1 billion federal-aid package included in the new budget agreement, nine of the city's major agencies, covering everything from schools and housing to public works and the police, have been taken away from Barry and placed under the jurisdiction of a financial control...