Comeback Cities: A Blueprint for Urban Neighborhood Revival, by
Paul S. Grogan and Tony Proscio. Westview Press, 285 pages,
$25.00.
In Comeback Cities, Paul S. Grogan and Tony
Proscio make the case
that ordinary people can “change, create, and make use of
market forces
to alter the fundamental economics of their neighborhoods.”
They offer a
well told and hopeful story of grass-roots activity
breathing new life
into cities–even in such blighted areas as New York’s South
Bronx.
Their focus is on the work of community development corporations(CDCs). “With government support, and a minimum of regulations,” theauthors say, CDCs “are among the most effective vehicles for publicinvestment in the inner city.”
The authors draw on the success of the national organization Groganheaded for 13 years, the Local Initiatives Support Corporation, or LISC.(Grogan is now an executive at Harvard University; Proscio is a formerjournalist and government official who is a consultant to nonprofitorganizations.) Founded more than two decades ago by the Ford Foundationto provide financial and technical support for community developmentgroups, LISC has played a major role in encouraging CDCs in theirefforts to attract investment, jobs, and people back to strugglingneighborhoods. Comeback Cities is an elaboration of
Life in theCity, a 1997 study by LISC and the Center for National
Policy. In turn
the book follows paths blazed in the mid-1990s by the U.S.
Department of
Housing and Urban Development (HUD) under Secretary Henry
Cisneros,
including the 1996 HUD report Comeback Communities: The Revival ofAmerica’s Cities.
Grogan and Proscio provide many examples of what CDCs can do. Forinstance, in Newark’s Central Ward, which was the site of riots in 1967,there has been an “amazing turnaround” led by the New CommunityCorporation (NCC). Founded by Father Bill Linder, a Catholic priest, theNCC has created more than 3,000 houses and apartments and asupermarket-anchored shopping center. There are day care centers and anursing home, a job-training-and-placement center, an elementary school,a credit union, and a newspaper. Now private developers are buildingmarket-rate housing nearby. “What the community organization created wasnot just a string of successful projects for its residents to take pridein,” the authors say. “It created a market, in which other enterprisesfound ways of adding value, making money, and widening the recovery inways that needed little or no civic or philanthropic prodding.”
There are many links that make such public-private partnershipswork: Federal, state, and local government are instrumental (togetherthey pumped literally billions of dollars into the South Bronx aloneduring the past two decades). Banks and other private lenders andinvestors–moved both by the “carrot” of the federal Low-Income HousingTax Credit and the “stick” of the federal Community ReinvestmentAct–are key. And retail chain stores and real estate developers, luredby the prospects of new inner-city markets, are important. As well, someCDCs have played a role in supporting urban anticrime efforts based oncommunity-oriented policing, and in sponsoring charter schools geared toimprove career opportunities and to retain and attract working familiesas neighborhood residents.
Comeback Cities is less impressive when the authors
stray from their
direct knowledge of CDCs and range into national policy.
Chapters on
public housing and welfare reform, “deregulating the city,”
and “the
‘third way’ in city hall” are the weakest. And factual
errors crop up
throughout the book. CDCs have sprung up across the
nation–but how
many? There are “more than 2,500” on page 56 and “more than
3,600″ on
page 69. Atlanta’s Techwood–which was not, as they report,
“America’s
first public housing” (that distinction belongs to New York
City’s First
Houses)–got its $42-million federal grant in 1993, not
1994. The law
requiring local public housing authorities that receive
federal funds to
demolish one “slum dwelling” for every new public housing
unit built was
passed by Congress and signed by the president in 1937, not
1949.
Those may be minor points, but this one isn’t: Most of the majorpublic housing reforms of recent years were first proposed by PresidentClinton and Secretary Cisneros in the Housing Choice and CommunityInvestment Act of 1994. That legislation passed the House but wasblocked in the Senate. Grogan and Proscio incorrectly state that theimpetus for such changes came from the Republican takeover of Congressin 1995 and that Cisneros was merely responding to the hostility ofcongressional conservatives. Such misinformed research and inadequatefact-checking undermine the authors’ credibility as national-policyexperts. Their book does a service, though, in spreading the news aboutthe many wonderful accomplishments of grass-roots efforts andpublic-private cooperation to revive American cities.
This article appears in Issue: Democracy in America?.
