If the government bears any responsibility for schools, safety, or health, then it is failing miserably in the heart of America's greatest cities. My first wish is that urban problems would actually garner some attention in the election campaign, and in America's public-policy discourse. But attention from the government, if unleavened with intelligence, can hurt rather than help high-poverty areas. We need both some political focus on the inner cities and a serious debate that will move us toward socioeconomic policies that actually help the poor. To begin, we need to take stock.
Many federal policies affect the lives of the urban poor.
Police, prisons, and the court system all matter deeply to the urban poor. A fourth major area of policy that affects inner-city populations is education. Fifth, recent initiatives such as employment zones and enterprise zones are intended to encourage private job-creating businesses to locate in cities. In examining all of these policies relative to their effects on the inner-city poor, we must ask two crucial questions. For example, building public housing in a neighborhood is a classic place-based strategy.