The Republican Way to Urban Renewal
By HHR | October 11th, 2009 | Category: Featured | 2 comments
Charles W. Brackett a moderate Republican commentator and writer for NewMajority.com highlights some suggestions that he hopes the Republican Party will utilize in order to improve it’s urban outreach. According to Bucket, “any urban renaissance must focus on sustainable spending”.
He writes: Our nation’s decaying cities are littered with downtown malls, civic centers and arenas. More often than not, these projects failed because the kinds of necessary improvements to civic life in education, healthcare, policing and basic services are ignored in favor of ‘get rich quick’ schemes.
In a 2007 study of Massachusetts’ decaying cities, the Pioneer Institute stressed the need for fiscal discipline as a key element in attracting and maintaining outside investment. Whether it comes in the guise of tax incentives or block grants, unrestrained federal spending on our cities or our suburbs will only put off hard choices.
More: Even ‘successful’ urban redevelopment strategies rarely touch the lives of the urban underclass. Urban development programs have been very good at attracting middle class people from outside the community, but less good at educating, protecting and advancing the disadvantaged people who already live in these cities. The Atlantic’s Hanna Rosin detailed the ways in which the highly-touted HOPE VI program succeeds in part by exporting a city’s poor, rather than by actually improving their own lives.
He concludes: The Johnson Administration’s ambitious and well meaning programs fell apart on the shoals of unsustainability, incivility and rising crime. A national urban renaissance that does not focus, first and foremost on making cities safe, improving local education and promoting fiscal discipline is doomed to fail.
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Nothing controvertial here! Right On!
I live in a ‘Massachusetts decaying city’ and I have the biggest problem with HUD programs. In poor cities slum lords cater to HUD clients and raise rent to HUD maximums. This makes it harder for poor working families (like me single mom of three making $1,000 a month) to find affordable housing. These HUD/Sections 8/ rent voucher programs help so few people it is insulting and then when people get on them they stay on them. I know people that refuse better paying jobs because they would lose their section 8! If these programs were a temporary hand-up instead of a debilitating hand-out then we wouldn’t have these problems. I checked into the program and the wait list is 6 years! I plan to be out of my need for help in 1 year if it kills me! The program is useless and HURTS poor people. The HUD programs are lining the pockets of people far outside of our town.
My Solution for decaying cities is local small business development and local owner occupied rentals!