Reclaiming our cities, block by block: how a Little Rock program offers hope for countering urban decay.

• Author: Barnes, Julian E.
• Position: Arkansas

At 1015 Schiller Street in Little Rock, Arkansas, a white house sits wanly. Flaking paint freckles its face; the pasty-gray particle board covering the front window is warping around the nails that hold it to the frame. Across from the house, a driveway leads to a vacant lot, clogged with Sumac trees, discarded flasks of vodka, and 40-ounce bottles of Schlitz malt liquor. Save for a church at the end of the block, 1015 Schiller is the only building on the street. And the rest of the neighborhood isn't doing much better. On nearby 11th Street, untrimmed trees and bushes hang over boarded-up porches like a jungle canopy. One nearby resident calls the area "Vietnam": a neighborhood of empty lots, forgotten houses, and gang turf.

But walk a bit further on 11th Street, and you start to notice a change. On the south side of the street the yards are mowed and the house paint is not peeling. One more block south the transformation is nearly complete. New sidewalks and street lamps border the smooth asphalt. In this small area, around Dennison Street, six new homes are wedged between renovated ones. On the lawn of one blue-trimmed, yellow-sided house, a sign reads "Neighborhood Alert Center."

In the last four years the city of Little Rock has transformed this area through a program called "Model Blocks." It works like this: On a single block in a dying neighborhood, the city builds new sidewalks and street lamps, fills vacant lots with new homes, and requires owners of nearby houses to make them livable. Near some of the Model Blocks the city has built "Alert Centers" for police, city inspectors, and community groups. For about $240,000 per block for housing work--paid for with federal grant money--and $126,000 per year for police and city workers, residents get a chance at a new neighborhood.

In 1996, the constituency for social spending in the cities has grown weaker and weaker. And the disillusionment, in many ways, is easy to understand. Dissatisfied with subsidized housing that seems to ruin good neighborhoods, the country has turned to schemes that purport to let the inner city help itself. In the last few decades, disbursement of cash aid and, more prominently, economic development initiatives came to prevail over housing programs. As Nicholas Lemann observed two years ago in The New York Times Magazine, saving the slums by encouraging business growth appealed to middle-class taxpayers because it cost less; it appealed to the poor because it gave them greater...