Over the years I've found that many environmentalists do make these connections. Webb will be installed next week as president of the U.S. Conference of Mayors. Issues of livability and sprawl have hit the public's radar screen as well, as evidenced by their prominence at the state level and by the passage of hundreds of open space and growth referenda last November. This was good news. The data shows that crime is down in our cities, and that the drop is steeper than in the suburbs.
Evidence shows that many big city mayors are turning their education systems around as well.
But in the aggregate, populations and jobs in suburbs are still growing much faster than in central cities. We have stopped going backward, but cities are still losing the race. The group discussed a range of strategies from transportation and land use efforts at the metropolitan level, to strategies to enhance metropolitan competitiveness by building on urban assets, to neighborhood improvement plans. Perhaps the most interesting discussion for me was the talk about how to frame these issues so that they were important and appealing to the candidates, and this meant moving away from a notion of dependency for the inner cities to a discussion of the city's role in the quality of life of everybody in the metro area, and to a recognition that much innovative thinking is coming from our nation's mayors. Clara, wide awake.