One can balance the books but still lose a city. Just ask Ed Rendell, the former mayor of Philadelphia. He heroically brought Philadelphia back from the brink of bankruptcy in the early 1990s only to find that it wasn't enough. The middle class still left, the new-economy firms still moved 30 miles away, the neighborhoods still declined. Cities like Hartford require radical solutions to extreme problems.
Cities can help relieve poverty only by creating opportunity.
They will become places of opportunity only when their assets are competitive in their regional economies. Such an effort will require state-backed municipal tax reform, essentially slashing land and business taxes for a fixed period of time. It will require local land reform, so that available land can be assembled, cleaned and prepared for redevelopment. But city-only solutions will not be sufficient. Hartford's decline is partly a reflection of state laws and practices that subsidize sprawl and permit suburbs to wall themselves off from regional responsibilities.