Mustering the little platoons: one mayor's attempt to create active citizens.

• Author: McClaughry, John
• Position: Book Review

Putting Faith in Neighborhoods: Making Cities Work Through Grassroots Citizenship, by Stephen Goldsmith, Noblesville, Ind.: Hudson Institute Publications, 200 pages, $19.95

PRIOR TO 1965, "urban policy" meant a redevelopment czar, a master plan, eminent domain, "people clearance," downtown megaliths, and high-rise public housing ghettos for the displaced poor. In that year it became clear this was a recipe for social disaster.

The flames over Watts, the uprising on Chicago's West Side, the marches in Boston's Roxbury, and the turbulence all over America put the "plight of the cities" high on the nation's policy agenda. Thus began a 30-year experiment in urban policy, centering on federally funded "community action," liberalized welfare entitlements, and "model cities." All of this proved to be at least as ineffectual, disruptive, and ill-conceived as the previous urban renewal regime.

By 1977 neighborhood activists across the country had mustered enough political strength to get Congress to force an unwilling Carter administration to accept the creation of a National Commission on Neighborhoods. In their site visits around the country, commission members heard an appalling litany of grievances, most of them concerning injuries inflicted by governments.

Even avowedly liberal neighborhood witnesses blasted governments for their stupid rules, venal politics, lust for tax dollars, pilfering and wasting of funds, suppression of grassroots initiative and, with respect to neighborhood organizations, complete disinterest at best and inveterate hostility at worst. As Sen. William Proxmire (D-Wis.) ruefully remarked to a witness at a 1977 Senate hearing, "You would probably have better neighborhoods today if there had been no federal programs at all!"

The Carter White House clearly had no use for the commission's 1979 report and deep-sixed it on arrival. Ronald Reagan, before he became president, had derided "foolish government policies over the past several decades [that] have often worked to undermine, even destroy established neighborhoods," but his White House staff and Housing and Urban Development appointees had little knowledge of or interest in anything below the level of city government. Eventually, the movement for a neighborhood-oriented national urban policy subsided.

What had perished in the swamps of Washington, however, emerged alive in Indiana. In 1992 Stephen Goldsmith was sworn in as the Republican mayor of Indianapolis. (With its combined city-county government, Indianapolis is one of the few large cities that has a chance of regularly electing a Republican mayor.) He became one of a small handful of mayors, including Democrats John Norquist in Milwaukee and Kurt Schmoke in Baltimore, who, in Goldsmith's words, "tackled problems like crime, high taxes, and poverty by reversing the ways in which local government was actually perpetuating the problems rather than helping to solve them."

Putting Faith in Neighborhoods...