The Next Wave of Urban Reform

„The upside of the city’s population decline is that affordable office space and homes are plentiful, even in well-occupied portions of the city. »Detroit has the opportunity to make itself attractive to young professionals who work at its universities and are drawn to urban living, and to immigrants, who now make up just 5 percent of the population«, says Lou Glazer, president of Michigan Future, Inc., an economic development group. »Mayor Bing can make a difference by making government more business-friendly.«

The urban-reform movement of the 1990s made its greatest inroads in cities that had retained a middle class and boasted a signature industry, like Wall Street in New York, to form the basis for revival. Newark and Detroit are in another category altogether, having suffered from decades of mismanagement that squandered billions of dollars in federal and state aid, delivered terrible services to those residents who remained in the city, and ensured that those who fled wouldn’t come back.

Today, the two cities finally have mayors who understand the urban achievements of the 1990s and are imitating them. Reform in the twenty-first century may come slowly to Newark and Detroit, and it may well require the work of several successive mayors. Even in their own cities, Booker’s and Bing’s efforts may remain controversial, as the recent defeat of Washington, D.C. mayor Adrian Fenty, a strong school-reform proponent, shows. But the two mayors have made a promising start.”