The Obama administration is making moves on urban policy, according to the Washington Post. An urban czar has been appointed (former Bronx borough president Adolfo Carrion Jr.) and $20 billion in stimulus money is being directed to urban programs outside education.
The approach is winning applause from local officials and urban thinkers, who credit the administration for quietly beginning the most ambitious new policy for the nation’s cities since the Great Society programs of the 1960s.
I’d like to give them the benefit of the doubt, but frankly I’m not convinced. You?
October 8th, 2009 at 9:46 pm
The current focus of the White House Office of Urban Policy seems to be on touring the country. While it is a good to gather information from the field, it seems as though the Obama Administration is operating more like a permanent campaign rather than getting on with the difficult and much less glamorous business of governing. I hope somebody back in DC is working on how to break through the programmatic “silos” administered by various Federal agencies. Without that, there will be no lasting accomplishment in the realm of urban and metropolitan policy.
October 9th, 2009 at 5:28 pm
The article is about urban renewal, focused on cities as “problem areas” rather than possibilities. Not a bad thing, but it’s not an urban policy addressing the kinds of things this forum is about in terms of cities as creative centers. The Great Society was about ending poverty, not creating a new economy.
Maybe that action is taking place under other names — high speed rail, education, research, arts?
October 11th, 2009 at 4:25 pm
Our local papers are reporting this from the perspective of Gary, which is being targeted for obvious reasons.
But Gary is so far gone, this is just throwing good money after bad. It is also counterproductive by funding the very people who are responsible for the decline and fall of the city.
It keeps the leeches from having to drop of the corpse by keeping it alive, to put it colorfully.