Urban Finance Under Siege.

• Author: Whelan, George

Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, Inc., 1993. (208 pp)

Reviewed by George Whelan, fiscal analyst with the City of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

This collection of seven essays is the product of a visiting-scholar symposium conducted by the editors at the University of Notre Dame. Each of the articles on the general subject of urban finance has been prepared either by one of the editors, who are faculty members at the University of Notre Dame, or by one of the visiting scholars.

The first two pieces, written by Swartz and Katharine C. Lyall, president of the University of Wisconsin System, respectively, establish a theme: the "devolution" of the federal government's concern for urban problems in the past 10 to 12 years, leaving state and local governments to "fend for themselves." The authors then sketch a bleak prospect for the future of urban finance with the expected declining or at least flattening of the real estate tax base (the principal source of revenue), because of declining birth rates negatively affecting housing prices and negative cyclical patterns in the commercial real estate market. Increasing pressure on cities to privatize and efforts to cope with the growing cultural and work force diversity will continue to pose serious problems in the future.

Articles written by Dick Netzer of New York University, James R. Fallain of Syracuse University and Andrew Reschovsky of the University of Wisconsin--Madison develop in more detail these macro trends in property taxes and housing value. The growth in values will not be adequate to provide significant relief for the increased fiscal pressures that cities will continue to face. Chapter five sketches some major cities' relative dependence on the property tax currently and concludes that only health care reform offers some hope for relief as cities face the strain of existing resources versus the demands of an increasingly dependent populace.

In chapter six, by William K. Tabb of Queens College, City University of New York, there is much lamenting about the shift in national political consciousness away from "a redistribution liberalism to a neo-conservative reprivatization." The author sketches a history of the 1930s through the 1970s, when it was thought that government...