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New York, New York/The Future of American Cities

Think Tank Transcripts: New York and Cities

ANNOUNCER: 'Think Tank' is made possible by Amgen, recipient ofthe Presidential National Medal of Technology. Amgen, helping cancerpatients through cellular and molecular biology, improving livestoday and bringing hope for tomorrow.

Additional funding is provided by the John M. Olin Foundation andthe Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation.

MR. WATTENBERG: Hello, I'm Ben Wattenberg. Last week on 'ThinkTank,' we discussed New York City, the good news and the not so goodnews. This week on the second of two programs, we'll continue thatdiscussion and widen our focus to include other American cities.

Joining us in Cooper Union's Great Hall to sort through theconflict and the consensus are: Fred Siegel, history professor at theCooper Union and author of the forthcoming 'Fall from Grace: NewYork, Washington, Los Angeles, and the Failure of Urban Liberalism';Ester Fuchs, director of the Barnard-Columbia Center for Urban Policyand author of 'Mayors and Money: Fiscal Policy in New York andChicago'; Michael Meyers, executive director of the New York CivilRights Coalition and adjunct professor at Mercy College; and JimSleeper, member of the editorial board of the journal 'Dissent' andauthor of 'The Closest of Strangers: Liberalism and the Politics ofRace in New York.'

The topic before this house: New York, New York, and the future ofAmerican cities, the second of two programs. This week on 'ThinkTank.'

Last week on 'Think Tank,' our panelists discussed the question,is there a new New York? This week we ask them to look at thenational situation.

Item: city size. Except for the immigrant gateways of New York andLos Angeles, the 10 largest cities in America have lost more than 20percent of their population since 1950. Some say this has led toso-called urban donuts, crime-ridden cities surrounded by thrivingsuburbs. But in the new decentralized economy, other observers saycities actually need to get smaller to get healthier.

Item: crime. Over 50 percent of city residents say they do notfeel safe walking alone at night. But the largest eight cities inAmerica have seen their violent crime rates drop by an average ofnearly 10 percent since 1994.

Item: welfare. New York's 1.2 million welfare recipients make upabout 14 percent of the population, not an atypical rate for bigAmerican cities. But the number of Americans on welfare has declinedsomewhat, and proposed new federal legislation could accelerate thattrend.

So the questions remain: Are cities getting better or worse? Andwhat should we do about the state of our cities?

Is what is happening in New York, which seems to me as I listen toyou all a picture of mixed progress, is this something that is NewYork generated, they're ahead of the curve giving an example to othercities, or has it been happening in other cities before New York? IsNew York going to school in the other cities? Or is it justhappening? Let's start with Fred on this one.

MR. SIEGEL: Ben, you know, when La Guardia was mayor and he waspresident of the United States Conference of Mayors, you could talkabout urban policy and the state of the cities. Cities today aredramatically divided. Southwestern and West Coast cities are doingextremely well. They have very little in common -- Houston andSeattle and San Diego are doing very, very well -- they have verylittle in common with the older, rusting hulks of Eastern cities,like Baltimore and Philadelphia. The headline in 'The PhiladelphiaInquirer' recently read -- and this is a city headed by a reformmayor, Ed Rendell -- recently read, 'Optimism for Next Year, Job LossRate Slows.' (Laughter.)

So I don't think we can any longer talk about national urbanpolicy. Part of the reason it's so hard to formulate urban policy inWashington now is there's no policy that fits all the cities. SanJose, which is the center of Silicon Valley, is booming. It does nothave problems in any way remotely similar to, say, Baltimore orPhiladelphia.

MS. FUCHS: I would amend what Fred is saying slightly here. Ithink that in the 1970s particularly, there was this dramatic chasmbetween a New York City and a Philadelphia and Pittsburgh andBaltimore, the rust belt cities, and the Southwest and what werecalled the economic growth cities. And that was really sort ofexaggerated in the New York City fiscal crisis. You guys have nothingto do with the rest of us here. What you did you created yourself.

Well, what happened in the end of the '70s and early '80s is,basically, the Southwest discovered that its economic boom was notforever, too. And you know, most of the country thought that in factNew York was alone and we could dismiss it. Well, it turns out thatNew York wasn't alone, that New York was ahead of the curve on itsproblems, and in a sense -- I don't say it was ahead of the curve onthe solutions, but it was certainly ahead of the curve on revealingthe extent to which urban America is plagued by, I think, a kind ofnever ending problem of balancing budgets.

And the biggest contributor to this for cities nationally isessentially having concentration of poverty in central cities rightnow.

MR. SLEEPER: America has always had a love-hate relation withcities. You know, you move to the suburb, you get a lawn with asplit-rail fence and a wagon wheel, it's your ponderosa. If you wantplaces where there's a lot of density, a lot of excitement, a lot ofunpredictable contact, all the wonderful things that cities do,you're going to have to invest in it. Now, that doesn't necessarilymean massive public sector subsidies, but --

MR. WATTENBERG: And you know, there is a -- out in the real worldthere, outside of Cooper Union and outside of the beltway, there is afour-letter word that encompasses all that, which is m-a-l-l.(Laughter.) I mean, you have malls in America that are the size ofmedium-sized cities.

MR. SLEEPER: That's right.

MR. WATTENBERG: What on earth is wrong with having them outside ofthe beltway instead of inside of the beltway?

MR. SLEEPER: Well, I think we'll find that out from the generationof young people that are growing up wholly in those malls without anyprevious urban experiences. I think we're getting --

MR. WATTENBERG: Excuse me, that is an urban experience.

MR. SLEEPER: Well, it's not what I would call an urban experience.

MR. WATTENBERG: I want to ask another question. President Clintonhas said that out-of-wedlock birth is our number one problem.Conservatives have been saying that for about a thousand years. Thecase has been made that the current mode of welfare policies havestimulated out-of-wedlock birth. Would tough-minded welfare reform,by which I mean making it harder to get on welfare and getting lessmoney, to make it less attractive, so that when a young girl getspregnant, she decides she'd better get married because she's notgoing to make it the other way, is this a -- because we're all, downin Washington, talking about welfare reform -- should this be aprincipal focus of urban reform and revitalization?

MR. MEYERS: Well, President Clinton has about 10 number onepriorities. Welfare reform is just one of them.

MR. WATTENBERG: Would that be your number one priority?

MR. MEYERS: No, not really, because I think it's one of thosecanards, one of those red herrings people keep chasing, because ifyou talk -- and everybody's in favor of welfare reform because nobodywants people on welfare who don't deserve it and don't need it.

MR. WATTENBERG: Well, why -- we had numbers before that showed asix- to seven-fold increase of welfare.

MR. MEYERS: Hey, society has changed, Ben. Where you been?

MR. WATTENBERG: Well, yeah. But --

MR. MEYERS: And the nature of poverty has increased. And this iswhere we agree.

MS. FUCHS: Deindustrialization.

MR. MEYERS: But this is where we agree. I mean, to the extent thatpeople are having children and making themselves more poor becausethey're having children, I think that's right. You need to tellpeople about the use of birth control, and until recently, we haven'teven used television to do that. We used to have this Puritan notionabout we can't talk about condoms on TV.

I'm in favor of the kind of welfare reform that says, and I thinkyour point is that people -- it is, this government is making it moredifficult to be on welfare, believe me, and to stay on welfare, butthe point is that it seems to me that the kind of welfare reform youneed is, the most important kind is child care, giving people childcare so they can get out into the work force, and having jobs outthere for them to take when they're available for the work force.

MR. SLEEPER: That's right. If we're willing to spend $50 billionon a job program -- if you're asking whether welfare is part of thatproblem of out-of-wedlock births, yes. But if you're asking whether adramatic cutback in welfare would reverse that problem, I think theanswer is no.

MR. WATTENBERG: Ester Fuchs, you have been shaking your head, no,no, welfare doesn't lead to illegitimacy, et cetera, et cetera. It'snot a big problem, it is a big problem?

MS. FUCHS: That's an important point here, and if we want to talkabout truly getting people into self-sufficiency and off welfare,which I think, as Michael pointed out, there is a general consensusout there regardless of ideology that, you know, able-bodied peopleshould be working, there should be jobs for people, one needs to berealistic about the situation.

First of all, in most large cities, the preponderance of people onwelfare are children, and the other --

MR. WATTENBERG: Oh, wait a minute, please. But the payments --

MS. FUCHS: But you need to know that there are children --

MR. WATTENBERG: No, but every child by definition has a mother.

MS. FUCHS: Right.

MR. WATTENBERG: And the payments are going to mothers.

MS. FUCHS: The payments are going to mothers --

MR. WATTENBERG: To take care of children.

MS. FUCHS: -- in support of children, so but when you construct areform, which I think we need to do, one needs to be reality-based,that somebody has to take care of these children who exist and whoare out there.

There are two stages in correcting the problem. It's one, what youwant to do in the future, but one, what you want to do with thecurrent population of welfare recipients.

MR. WATTENBERG: Stipulated.

MS. FUCHS: So you have to do deal with the children as well as themothers. And that, I think, is something that people are notrealistically paying attention to. So you need to have reallysignificant investment in child care if you really want to put momsto work.

MR. SIEGEL: I must say, this whole thing puzzles me. The one thingyou have in the inner city an abundance of is people who need work,mothers who are out of work, mothers who are taking care of their ownchildren. Why day care is a problem here is beyond me. It seems likethe easiest thing in the world to allow mothers who are alreadytaking care of their own children to take care of other children.

MR. MEYERS: The other problem, the other priority that Clintontalks about, number one priority, and that is the family breakdown.So even as you, Fred, are looking for these grandmothers and thesemothers, ultimately, --

MS. FUCHS: They're not there.

MR. MEYERS: -- they're not there, according to President Clinton'spriorities.

MR. WATTENBERG: All right now, hold on. Hold it. I want to move onjust for a moment because we are running out of time. There has beena lot of talk in the urbanology community, in the municipal budgetcommunity, that the road out deals with privatization and reinventinggovernment. You have all studied many cities. Is that anotherbuzzword, or is something happening out there?

MR. SLEEPER: I'd say right up front, there are a couple obviousproblems. Privatization in New York City, the earliest ventures wehad produced a lot of corruption and a lot of waste, some of our --

MR. WATTENBERG: What about outside of New York?

MR. SLEEPER: -- biggest municipal scandals? No, all I'm saying isthat privatization in itself -- I happen to agree that a lot ofthings should be privatized because municipal unions have strangledthem, but how it's done is very important.

MR. WATTENBERG: Michael, you have traveled around the country. Doyou get a sense that this is something big and for real and good, oris it --

MR. MEYERS: I get a sense right away that particularly poor peopledon't like public type things. They don't like having to go into apublic hospital and sitting in an emergency room and waiting forhours and not getting decent care and being charged $125 for a visitfrom an anonymous doctor. No. If privatization could be somethingother than a buzzword, if privatization could really improve thequality of life for an enormous number of people, hey, I'm for it.And I'm also against big government. I think most people are againstbig government that's inefficient and irresponsible and costly.

MR. WATTENBERG: Okay, but can it? I'm asking you as an observerand a scholar and a student, is there evidence that it is doing it?

MR. MEYERS: I think it can. I think privatization can work,particularly in terms of schools. But it works for fewer people thanthe public sector because the public sector virtually appeals to andresponds to the needs of the masses, just as public schools.

MR. SIEGEL: One of the best examples of privatization working is acompany called America Works. It has an extraordinary record oftaking people on welfare and placing them in paying jobs with healthinsurance.

MR. MEYERS: With governmental subsidies, Fred.

MR. SIEGEL: I'm not arguing -- I'm not saying government doesn'thave to be involved. But what's interesting is they do what privatewelfare departments can't do. They make their living by placingpeople. If the Department of Welfare in New York City doesn't placepeople, which it doesn't, there's no consequence. People continue toreceive their salaries.

MR. WATTENBERG: You mean their payments.

MR. SIEGEL: Their payments. If America Works doesn't place peoplein long-term jobs, those people don't stay in the jobs, they don'tmake a profit. This is an example where privatization has workedbrilliantly. But precisely because it's worked brilliantly, it'sgenerated tremendous public sector opposition from public sectorunions.

MR. MEYERS: But the America Works people tell me -- they tell methat their program works because the mothers from welfare somehow getsome sort of governmental subsidy, such as child care and extensionof Medicaid benefits. Those are forms of welfare.

MR. WATTENBERG: Excuse my ignorance. Is America Works national?

MR. SIEGEL: Yes. Yes.

MS. FUCHS: Well, it's in seven cities now. But I think what is --

MR. WATTENBERG: What cities beside New York?

MS. FUCHS: It's in Chicago and New York.

MR. SIEGEL: Indianapolis.

MS. FUCHS: Indianapolis and in Chicago as well.

MR. WATTENBERG: And do you think it's working?

MS. FUCHS: It's going into Baltimore in the empowerment zone. Ithink it's a wonderful program also, but I agree with Michael thatit's a partnership with government.

MR. MEYERS: Mixture.

MS. FUCHS: And I think that this either/or syndrome that we're inis not really the way to go. I mean, one thing that most peopleprobably don't realize is that cities have been privatizing for avery long time. Social services in this country are by and large doneby contracted out, not-for-profit or for-profit, private, quotes,organizations. You know, you look at the so-called charities,Catholic charities, Jewish charities, Protestant charities. All oftheir social services functions are essentially contracts fromgovernment, okay?

So, you know, the irony of the privatization argument is, youknow, it goes back to Jim's point, I think, is that you have to beforever vigilant. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't, andwhat we need to do is look at the areas in which it's mostconstructive and can work well.

MR. WATTENBERG: Senator Coats of Indiana and Chairman Kasich ofOhio have introduced a 17-bill package, the jewel of which is a$1,000-per-couple tax credit -- not deduction -- tax credit forcharitable giving, which is, in effect, a federal government subsidyto private charitable agencies, that you would -- I mean, I heardCoats explain it. He said, if you had a choice between giving yourmoney --giving a thousand dollars to the Department of Human Servicesin Chicago, or whatever, or picking your own charity to give it to,who would you give it to? And wouldn't it be more efficient? Doesthat make sense?

MS. FUCHS: No. I mean, I really think that that's missing thepoint of the problem. I mean, first of all, if you are a publicsector agency providing social services and you have a caseload,which has been the case in New York and other cities -- counties, of50 cases per case worker, and you have no capacity to provide jobs,well, that's a poorly run agency which you're not going to get, youknow, much service from.

Basically, a lot of agencies have been constructed that way,partly because of budget cuts, partly because of inefficiencies. Butin order to improve that, you could improve that either through thepublic sector providing a better service with maybe 15 cases, or youcould privatize.

MR. WATTENBERG: But you just said that the public sector providesinefficient services. You just said it.

MS. FUCHS: But why? Partly because they're completely underfunded.You can't be a case worker with 50 jobs -- 50 cases.

MR. WATTENBERG: But are you making the case that before the budgetcuts, these agencies were working efficiently?

MS. FUCHS: No, no, no. I mean, I'll go back to my original point,which is to say you need to look at it service by service to see whatworks and what doesn't work. But what I'm saying is for sure yourpublic sector agency is not going to work if you have 50 cases percase worker. It's completely impossible.

MR. SLEEPER: But, you know, the Coats package raises an importantprinciple, which is that the choice shouldn't always have to be justbetween having a large public sector bureaucracy or having thegovernment doing the contracting out, which it often does also verypoorly.

He's pointing to a third alternative, which in certain ways andcertain areas might be better, that certain kinds of charitableprovision would make sense if there was really money going into themfrom people who are not bound by the same strictures that governmentbureaucrats are bound by.

MR. WATTENBERG: Could that help cities across America, Fred?

MR. SIEGEL: I'm skeptical. I'm skeptical for the followingreasons. The reason private sector organizations work is because theycan set their own standards. If they begin to accept governmentmoney, they'll lose the ability to set their own standards.

MR. SLEEPER: That's my point.

MR. WATTENBERG: All right, but wait a minute. His point is thatit's not government money. It is you are writing a check to the YMCA,and you then deduct a hundred percent of that on your taxes, nevergoing through the government. That's the way he would --

MR. SIEGEL: But Ben, the problem with that is someone in Congresswill say, See, this is a tax expenditure. And it will become anissue.

MR. SLEEPER: But that's the battle.

MR. SIEGEL: The question of money is crucial. The city ofWashington, D.C., has more money to spend per capita, per case of anytype -- take any type of social ailment -- than any other city inAmerica. The city is in total collapse. There's no toilet paper inthe city hall, it can't plow its roads in the middle of the winter.

The problem with public sector bureaucracies is they're incapableof setting standards and holding people to them. Once you bringgovernment in, directly or indirectly, it'll be seen as a publicissue.

MR. SLEEPER: Isn't that the point of the Coats bill, is to takegovernment out?

MR. SIEGEL: Yeah, but my argument is that what the Coats bill willdo, by providing tax credit the way it does, indirectly will bringgovernment in to ruin those existing problem institutions.

MR. WATTENBERG: Let's finish up this fascinating discussion onsort of a broader topic. Thirty or so years ago, I know, when Istarted writing books about the census, it was sort of a rule ofthumb that America was divided into thirds. It was a third city, athird suburb and a third rural.

In the course of the last 30 years, the suburban sector has grownso rapidly, it is now 51, 52 percent. I mean, for the first time inAmerican history, in the last few years, you can make a statement,America is a suburban nation, and you can prove it. I mean -- or amajority suburban. You could never say it was a majority urban or amajority rural or a majority suburban.

And there are good reasons for that. People have problems withcities. They want the quarter acre.

MR. SIEGEL: Space.

MR. WATTENBERG: They want space, they want places for their kids,whatever. Whatever.

MS. FUCHS: They don't want to deal with the poverty populationconcentrated in central cities.

MR. SLEEPER: They don't want to deal with parks that aren't keptclean and orderly.

MR. WATTENBERG: Absolutely. Now, long range, are we going to dealwith this massive problem of our cities, or are we just going to sortof organically move them out of town? Fred?

MR. SIEGEL: The huge cities, the 19th century cities that werecreated no longer have an economic rationale. New York cannot sustain7 1/2 million people economically. We grew these enormous cities whenthe railroad was the primary means of transportation, when it was --all energy was concentrated in these focal points. The automobile,the truck has dispersed population, dispersed economic activitieslong before the fax and the computer. Cities can never again have therole they once had.

MR. WATTENBERG: Is that the good news or the bad news?

MR. SIEGEL: It's the facts. It's neither good nor -- cities haveto adjust. Cities have a tremendous role in the future. Creativity --intellectual creativity, economic creativity -- is going to takeplace in cities like New York and Los Angeles, where the digitaleconomy is being created as we sit here. That's going to give citiesan important role for the future.

There was a very interesting story recently. MCI moved out ofWashington, moved to Boulder, Colorado. They discovered that thecreativity dried up.

MR. SLEEPER: Colorado Springs.

MR. SIEGEL: Colorado Springs. People couldn't operate there.

MS. FUCHS: They all went skiing.

MR. SIEGEL: They needed a cosmopolitan atmosphere where people areconstantly interacting on a face-to-face basis.

MR. SLEEPER: They decided it's been a mistake.

MR. SIEGEL: It's been a mistake because --

MR. SLEEPER: And they're still out there.

MR. WATTENBERG: And now they want to --

MR. SIEGEL: -- they lack in Colorado Springs the energy, thediversity that allows for a kind of intellectual creativity in theeconomy.

MR. WATTENBERG: So you think there is a role for cities, but it'snot going to be --

MR. SIEGEL: It's a different one. It's not mega-cities. You know,Manhattan has an economic future; it's not clear that the city offive boroughs has an economic future. The San Fernando Valley isseceding from Los Angeles. It's not clear that the unified city ofLos Angeles has an economic future.

But the creative forces of the economy are going to be places likethe Bay Area, San Jose, Los Angeles, and New York and Boston. Thesecities have a bright future.

MS. FUCHS: Cities have an important role in the future of theeconomy, but it's not all cities, and that's part of the problem, youknow, with the general conversation. There are global cities, likeNew York, Miami, Chicago, Los Angeles, which will be connected tothis world economy that we're dealing with now, and they aredifferent in kind than Newark or Gary, Indiana, or cities which haveessentially been ravaged by deindustrialization, were one-companytowns and now are basically bastions of poverty.

There are cities which are too small which have declined to such apoint in which they don't have any economic base in which to sellthemselves anymore to anybody. And I think that --

MR. WATTENBERG: For example, which ones? I know you said Gary andNewark.

MS. FUCHS: I would say Gary, Camden, even Newark.

MR. SIEGEL: East St. Louis.

MS. FUCHS: That these were cities which were company towns whichessentially lost their company, and the result of that is dramaticeconomic decline and concentrations of poverty. And our problem nowin a federal system is that we're telling these cities that they needto create an economic base to support these poverty populations. Itdoesn't make any sense. So that we need a policy which addresses thatproblem separately.

MR. SLEEPER: I agree with Esther about the global city thing. Wecan't predict what the economic configurations will be. But in themeantime, I think it's true that those cities are needed not only forintellectual creativity, but as a staging ground, as a crucible forimmigrants. Clearly, you have to have immigrant enclaves in cities.Those kinds of things are going to work for the half dozen cities shementioned. For the others, I agree, it's very problematic unlessthere's some new kind of economic investment that we haven'tenvisioned yet.

And the last point on that is, in 1975, in New York, people neverforesaw the immense financial services boom. Even here, peoplethought it was all going to shrink to five million men. It didn't inpart --

MR. WATTENBERG: Five million people.

MR. SLEEPER: That's right. Things do pop up, but not everywhereand not in every place.

MR. WATTENBERG: Michael Meyers, last word.

MR. MEYERS: Well, some cities will be dysfunctional and they won'tbe revitalized. There are some cities that must be revitalized andmust survive, like New York City, like Los Angeles.

And as you look at the suburbs, you need cities, at the veryleast, for the people who will get tired of the suburbs to come backto. (Laughter.)

And moreover, you have problems going out to the suburbs. All kindof city problems are going out to find themselves in the suburbs --crime and drugs and --

MS. FUCHS: Housing.

MR. MEYERS: -- and housing problems. And so I think, you know, aswe build our society, we have to really think about, like town andgown, we have to think about city and suburb as being joined. Ourdestiny is joined because we are one people. Let's get back togetherand act like that.

MR. WATTENBERG: Thank you, Fred Siegel, Ester Fuchs, MichaelMeyers, and Jim Sleeper.

And thank you. We enjoy hearing from our viewers. Please send yourcomments and questions to: New River Media, 1150 17th Street, N.W.,Washington, D.C. 20036. We can also be reached via e-mail atthinktv@aol.com or on the World Wide Web at www.thinktank.com.

For 'Think Tank,' I'm Ben Wattenberg.

ANNOUNCER: This has been a production of BJW, Incorporated, inassociation with New River Media, which are solely responsible forits content.

'Think Tank' is made possible by Amgen, recipient of thePresidential National Medal of Technology. Amgen, helping cancerpatients through cellular and molecular biology, improving livestoday and bringing hope for tomorrow.

Additional funding is provided by the John M. Olin Foundation andthe Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation.

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