Introduction

 

There can be no disagreement that poverty, its causes, effects, and persistence are at the heart of the political development, functioning, and public policy debate of American cities.  The very discussion of urban politics, from the standpoint of those residents and academics outside the city which often wield inordinate political power over the lives of city residents, often revolves around the perception of cities solely as of havens concentrated poverty and crime (Wilson, 1990, pp. 6-18).  Additionally, the antisocial effects that accompany poverty, such as high crime, drug abuse, and overall political apathy, are often at the root of urban policy discussions rather than examinations of the origin and role of poverty as a central cause of these effects. Therefore, in any complete examination of both the political development, and public policy directions of American cities one must address the not only the ways in which impoverished citizens attempt to navigate and manipulate the levers of power, but also the political ideologies and public policies that shape their political choices and realities. 

Three readings, ‘The Truly Disadvantaged’ by William Wilson, Bargaining for Brooklyn by Nicole Marwell, and Can Cities Be Trusted with Redistributive Policy? by Leah Brooks, Justin Phillips, and Tom Ogarzalek, attempt to do just that in their structural examination of several causes of urban poverty and its effect on urban politics. However, there is missing from them a broader analysis of the ways in which three larger influences of public policy; federal spending, criminal justice, and globalization have in the past created, exacerbated, and maintained structures of urban poverty and obstacles to ameliorating it.

 

Federal Spending

              The policies and involvement of the federal government in cities, which expanded during President Johnson’s “War on Poverty”, had all but evaporated with the ascendancy of the Republican Party in the 1980s based on a its central political argument that government itself was the problem with respect to solving the urban poverty and social blight (Wilson, 1990, pp. 16-18). The Reagan Administration cut funding for public service jobs and job training, federal assistance to local governments by 60% as well as eliminated general revenue sharing to cities (Dreier, 2004). Additionally, they cut the anti-poverty Community Development Block Grant program (CDBG) and reduced the federal government’s share of city governments from 22% in 1980 to 6%, in 1988, cut the budget for public housing in half with devastating consequences to urban infrastructure (Dreier, 2004).

Wilson argues that these conservative public policy initiatives were enacted as a political backlash to a shift in urban policy from assistance to the individual and to creating equality for a group, in this case explicitly to African Americans through Affirmative Action policies and more broadly to them through urban policies like block grants and jobs programs (Wilson, 1990, pp. 112-120).  He points to the growth of the urban underclass under these group and race-based program of the ‘War on Poverty’ while bringing limited success to middle-class members of these same groups. What he ignores in his critique of these programs, however, is the very 'resource scarcity model' context, describes effectively by Brooks et al, in which cities operate.  Under this model, cities are constrained by inter-jurisdictional competition from both other cities, and surrounding suburbs such they are limited in the services they can provide to their residents and mitigate the extent to which they can appeal to median voter preferences (Brooks, Phillips, & Ogorzalek, 2008, pp. 2-8).  Wilson fails to address the extent to which the reduction of federal spending within cities through cuts in CDBG's and other funding structures exacerbated these constraints such that they had a devastating impact on individuals and urban community groups. 

Marwell examination of community organizations differing strategies in response to this federal divestment in cities emphasizes not only the importance of the federal role in the politics of cities.  Both the Ridgewood-Bushwick approach of targeting sand utilizing shrinking public funds for communities, and Saint Barbara’s approach of looking for better results of public spending concede the reality of declining role of the federal government in providing funding for cities that increased dramatically during the 1980’s (Marwell, 2007, pp. 96-102).  However, rather than his concession, community groups and urban municipalities could proactively expose not only the necessity of the federal funds in ameliorating urban decline but also the ways in which its decline has created exacerbated that decline.

 

Cities as Battlefields

              An important exogenous force both acting on the realities of urban political structures and missing from the three readings is the increased political nature of the federal criminal justice system.  As the so-called 'War on Drugs' was expanding beginning with the Reagan Administration in the 1980's, there were many changes in the execution and enforcement of the criminal justice system that had an impact on the public policies and political structures within and around urban centers (Tonry, 1994, pp. 475-76).  Political scapegoating of urban drug sellers and users combined with increased media depiction of cities as urban dens of drug culture moved suburban public opinion in favor of stricter drugs policies and enforcement targeted at urban populations (Goetz, 1996). One such measure was the increased use of local and federal joint task forces in order to prosecute drugs offenders and coordinate those prosecutions with other social agencies like federal housing, child services, health code enforcement agencies (Goetz, 1996, pp. 344-346).

              While Wilson describes the increased incarceration rates among impoverished unemployed young men as a result of de-industrialized urban centers (Wilson, 1990), he fails to address the ways in which exogenous political elites, both in the surrounding suburbs and at the federal level, create conditions and structures that intensify to those incarceration rates within the criminal justice system. This dimension of exogenous political and public policy pressures, while overlooked by the purely fiscal constraints Brooks et al. posited in their resource scarcity model, acts on the political institutions and actors within cities in directions that ameliorate political constituencies outside the city often at the expense of the city resident 's preferences.  Marwell touches upon these political pressures when she exposes the impact of the federal urban renewal projects precipitated in the 1950's on many urban neighborhood community groups (Marwell, 2007, pp. 36-40), but does not expand them to include exogenous political opinions of enforcement of the criminal justice system within the urban core.  Likewise, these three readings fail to address the ways in which the criminal justice system not only acts as an instrument of exogenous political pressure and public policy directional pressure, but also as a political institution unto itself with strong actors like police organizations, federal and local prosecutors, and judges influencing, constraining, and changing the urban political reality for its residents. 

 

Globalization

              The last exogenous constraint on urban political institutions and actors in providing services for their residents and interest groups is the increased globalized competition for goods and services which has characterized the last thirty years.  Wilson closely examines the ways in which globalization broadly, and de-industrialization more specifically, has economically impacted the people of the urban core both in terms of increased unemployment, and resultantly increased incarceration.  Where he fails, and both Marwell, and Brooks et al. succeed however is by illuminating the ways in which the pressures and realities of globalization have political implications on urban institutions and interest groups.  The three most stark political implications of globalization on urban politics has outward movement of jobs, the rise of the service industry, and the erosion of urban tax base from which to supply services.

              Globalization in the last thirty years has resulted in the movement of manufacturing jobs out of urban centers, which were heavily economically dependent on them, into suburbs or overseas in order to find lower wages and illicit higher profits. Wilson accurately describes that how the economic problems of the underclass are a structural result of this suburbanization and deindustrialization.  This, combined with the influx of suburban White Women into the workforce, has resulted in the high unemployment of African American men who were most dependent on mechanized work. This, he posits, led to concentrations of poverty in inner-cities as upper and middle-class Blacks moved to the suburbs as a result of integration and end to aggressive suburban redlining leaving socially isolated poor and uneducated people imbued in the antisocial behaviors endemic to a 'culture of poverty' psychology (Wilson, 1990, pp. 52-60).  While Wilson calls for a more activist government to engage these poor more in keeping with European social welfare state, he focuses primarily on the economic impacts on individuals in the city rather than political impacts of globalization on urban political institutions and community groups. 

              Brooks et al. expose these political implications by showing urban political constraints that result from globalization induced inter-jurisdictional competition and the ways in which cities use CDBGs to mitigate these constraints. "Elected officials can use block grant revenues to provide services or pork to influential interest groups, community organizations, and neighborhoods whose demands they may normally be unable to meet" (Brooks, Phillips, & Ogorzalek, 2008, pp. 6-8) Marwell show several examples of community groups exploiting and manipulating their political leverage with urban political institutions in order to illicit services while acknowledging the reality of the constrained political environment which governs the economic limitation of both the institutions, and the community groups themselves (Marwell, 2007, pp. 83-98).

              Many of these economic and political constraints are caused by the eroded tax base that results from the loss of manufacturing jobs due to globalization. None of the readings, however, illustrate the ways in which political elites from outside the city, either at the suburban, state or federal level, manipulate the forces of globalization such that cities bear disproportionate economic constraints and tax erosion vis-a-vis suburbs. Unfortunately, the economic and political constraints are written about in all three readings as natural forces under which cities fell particularly prey rather than artificially induced or exacerbated by elites within political institutions or interest groups. 

 

Conclusion

              This week’s three readings, ‘The Truly Disadvantaged’ by William Wilson, Bargaining for Brooklyn by Nicole Marwell, and Can Cities Be Trusted with Redistributive Policy? by Leah Brooks, Justin Phillips, and Tom Ogarzalek offer a structural examination the political causes and implications urban poverty and the ways in which actors, interest groups, and institutions navigate within the constraints that that poverty creates. While Wilson examines the exogenous forces which constrain urban individuals, Marwell focuses on community groups and the ways in which they attempt to provide maximal instrumental gains for their community within these constraints. Finally, Brooks et al present an insightful theoretical framework, the 'resource scarcity model ', through which we can better view these constraints and the political and economic realities that are manifest within them.  In addition to these thought examinations, I contend that an analysis of political impacts on the urban individual, institution, and interest groups of the exogenous forces of federal spending levels, policy directions and preferences of the criminal justice system, and economic globalization will better explain the urban politics' past, present, and future.

 

 

Bibliography

Brooks, L., Phillips, J., & Ogorzalek, T. (2008, April 4). Can Municipal Governments Be Trusted with Policy Implementation? A Re-Evaluation of Federal Block Grants. Retrieved June 10, 2009, from http://citation.allacademic.com/meta/p_mla_apa_research_citation/2/6/8/7/6/pages268769/p268769-1.php

 

Dreier, P. (2004, May/June). Reagan’s Legacy: Homelessness in America. Retrieved June 26, 2009, from Shelterforceonline: http://www.nhi.org/online/issues/135/reagan.html

 

Goetz, E. G. (1996). The US War on Drugs as Urban Policy. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research , 20, 539-549. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1468-2427.1996.tb00332.x/full

 

Marwell, B. N. (2007). Bargaining for Brooklyn: Community Organizations in the Entrepreneurial City. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/B/bo5586843.html

 

Tonry, M. (1994). Racial Politics, Racial Disparities, and the War on Crime. Crime & Delinquency , 40, 475-94. http://cad.sagepub.com/content/40/4/475.abstract

 

Wilson, W. J. (1990). The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press.

 

 

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