Keys to Success for AMERICA'S CITIES

Paul Helmke

The flight to the suburbs is being reversed, thanks to restoration of services, amenities, and, especially, safety on urban streets.

Many of the problems in America's cities basically are the same, regardless of size or region of the country. Let me illustrate this with a humorous anecdote from the angle of police protection.

The police department of a hypothetical city was conducting exams for new officers. In one of the tests, candidates asked how they would respond to the following situation: They are on duty, directing traffic in the downtown area, when there is a car wreck. When the officer rushes over to the wreck, he discovers that the woman in the front seat is the wife of the police commissioner and she is with a man who is not her husband. Meanwhile, a bus rams into the back of the car and the bus catches on fire. At the same time, a siren goes off in the building next door, signaling a fire drill there. People begin rushing out of the building.

The question on the exam is: As a police officer, how would you handle these simultaneous situations? As one might imagine, the candidates had much to write about. Yet, one person in the front row opened the test book, wrote for about a minute, closed the booklet, and sat there. Naturally, the examiner wanted to see what the man had written. So, he looked at the booklet and found: "Remove uniform and mingle with crowd."

One of the challenges of being a mayor is that you are on the spot all the time, but you can't just remove your identity and mingle with the crowd. You must be immediately accessible to your constituents.

That's why I believe that the so-called devolution revolution is a good thing. I think it's important to bring decision-making back to the local level. One size doesn't fit all, and I feel that people in local communities can make the decisions best that affect their lives. I see a number of challenges, though, if devolution is going to work.

A look historically at the growth of the Federal government reveals that a lot of the drive behind it was the fact that cities realized they weren't able to handle the problems which were being generated at the beginning of the Great Depression. Mayors started calling on the Federal government to do the job. Once the latter began to do so, it grew and grew.

Before reversing that trend, it is necessary to make sure that cities are in a position to handle issues currently being addressed nationally. I see three basic areas that must be dealt with in the future. One concerns structure; the second focuses on what I'll call anchors; and the third encompasses front-door issues.

Structural issues refer particularly to the controversy about regional or metropolitan government and where to draw the lines. At the local level, what cities need to do is redraw the boundaries. In many places, mayors deal with jurisdictional boundary lines that grew out of the late 1800s or early 1900s. Cities haven't let those change to fit the economic and demographic reality of their communities. To me, the test is a simple one. If you are aboard an airplane flying into an urban area, you can see where the city is. Where the development and growth stop, that's where the city should stop, too. A city is defined by its housing, economic, transportation, and media patterns, not those artificial boundary lines called city limits.

While it is politically difficult or dangerous to talk about things like metropolitan government or consolidated government, these phases need to be resurrected or cities will not be able to handle the new responsibilities they face. If mayors seek to take control away from the Federal government, they also need to say, let's make the cities make sense.

One of the strengths we have in Fort Wayne is that Indiana has very good laws on annexation. In the time that I have been mayor, the city's population has risen from about 173,000 to around 200,000, partly through growth, but primarily through annexations. If Fort Wayne had kept its 1950 boundaries, there would have been a 33% population loss instead of a 33% gain. The minority population would be 25% instead of 17%. The poverty rate would be about 15.5% instead of less than 10%. The city's bond rating, instead of being AA, would be BAA.

One of the things I have tried to get across to people in my community is that when the suburbs complain about annexation and taxes going up, they should realize they are helping create a stronger metropolitan area, which, in the long run, will benefit everyone. Eventually, taxes are likely to go down and the area will be more prepared to handle crime, economic development, and other issues.

The property tax rate is 13% lower than it was when I first took office in 1988, primarily because of annexations. Our entire community now is working to build a strong city, instead of abandoning it to poor and elderly inner-city residents.

Local government doesn't make sense in most parts of the country today because it doesn't reflect economic realities. For one thing, there is so much overlapping local government. In Indiana, for example, we have townships, county government, municipal government, school district government, and special district government. Does that make sense?

Townships, for instance, were created in Indiana in the 1850s in light of the fact that youngsters would walk to school, and citizens wanted a township of the size where the kids could do that easily. They reflected the fact that townships dealt with things like fire protection, and residents wanted to make sure that, if the fire bell rang, everyone could hear it and get to the site. They dealt with welfare or poor relief issues, as well as situations where, if someone's house or barn burned down, all the neighbors would get together to raise a new one. They reflected transportation and communications systems in the 1850s.

Counties were created in most states to reflect the reality that, on horseback, one would go down to the county seat maybe once a month, maybe once a week, to file deeds, see the judge, go to the bank, etc. Citizens couldn't deal with them more often.

With technology, obviously, commuting and transportation patterns have changed, but governmental structure hasn't changed to reflect them. Unless the structure is changed, local government isn't going to be able to handle local needs, and power is going to be slipping right back to the Federal level, no matter how much lip service is paid to the word "devolution."

Anchors. Point number two, we need to deal with anchors in our community. To keep a community strong, not only does the structure have to be sturdy, but existing resources have to be built upon. By anchors, I mean schools, churches, parks, and hospitals. Those help define neighborhoods.

Too often, when decisions are made about those anchors, they are not considered in terms of the over-all city. For example, a school system may decide to build a new high school, put it on the edge of the city, and close the old dilapidated central city high school. What this really may be doing is destroying the neighborhood anchored by that high school. In our community, that was done 30 years ago. Today, we choose instead to fix up the central city high schools, put in an Olympic-sized swimming pool, and do things that say this is a stable neighborhood, a place where people need and want to stay.

Too much of the time, those decisions aren't made by the mayors, city council members, or city planners. They are made by some other unit of government or some other decision-maker who doesn't look at the big picture.

Hospitals, we found in our community, help anchor neighborhoods. I know some people who, 30 years ago, lived on one of the fanciest streets in town. They were concerned that the neighborhood was changing, so they moved out. However, that street is even stronger today than it was 30 years ago because there is a hospital about five blocks from there and physicians want to stay close to it, so the doctors continue to invest in that neighborhood.

When it comes to churches, schools, hospitals--the community anchors--too much of the time, decisions are made just for the reason that a new building and the land around it are going to be cheaper outside the neighborhood. As a result, the anchor is lost.

There are Federal policies that encourage this as well. When the Federal government says that storm water regulations are needed in an urban area, but not outside the city boundary line, then there is an incentive for churches, schools, and businesses to locate outside the city boundary line. That doesn't make sense. That is being self-defeating and must stop.

Front-door issues. When people open the door to their house or apartment, they want to make sure that the neighborhood looks decent, that there aren't weeds growing, that the house across the street isn't falling down. They want to make sure that it is safe to open that front door, that they don't have to worry about a drive-by shooting, that they can feel comfortable standing there to pick up the paper or bring in the mail.

These front-door issues are the things that people deal with on a day-to-day basis. What we found in Fort Wayne--and in cities around the country--is that it is possible to deal with front-door issues by giving more and more authority to individual neighborhoods and citizens.

For instance, we have established what we call community-oriented government. This is an outgrowth of community-oriented policing. Basically, it is a philosophy that all city departments are there to serve the residents, and the residents are who need to determine what is important to them.

We have found that what local individuals have told us usually is different from what we assumed were the "big" issues. Noise in the neighborhood drives people crazier than some of the things planners make so much fuss about. The peeling paint on the house across the street is going to have a lot more of an impact on the future of a neighborhood than even the pothole at the end of it.

Community-oriented government relates to crime, too, by means of the so-called broken window theory. This concept states that a neighborhood starts going downhill when a broken window remains unrepaired. The next step after the broken window is that someone is going to paint graffiti on the garage. Then, the people are going to move out. The rundown house remains vacant, and kids begin to use it to smoke dope. Then, it is going to be used by gang members, and they are going to start shooting at rival gang members.

The broken window is the start of a decline in a neighborhood because it sends the signal that no one cares. If you fix that broken window and that peeling paint, however, you send a message that it is worthwhile to stay in that community.

Cities need to worry about the front-door issues. If they don't deal with them, residents are going to go out their doors and not come back. Mostly, people are staying put in America's cities today. Others, who left for the suburbs, are coming back. It's an exciting time, a challenging one.

The fact is that people want to live with other people. They like to have a sense of community. City leaders need to find ways through governmental structure, through the decisions they make about preserving anchors, through front-door issues to create that sense of community.

Mr. Helmke, Mayor of Fort Wayne, Ind., served as president of the U.S. Conference of Mayors from June, 1997, to June, 1998.

COPYRIGHT 1998 Society for the Advancement of Education
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning