The Prince of the City

Before we consider the problem of sustaining the urban revival, let's consider the nature of the revival itself. The prosperity of the 1990s was different from earlier expansions. The 1960s boom had been accompanied by riots, rapidly rising crime rates, and social breakdown. In the 1980s, many major cities, including Detroit and Baltimore, never caught the economic wave, while those that did still suffered from increasing crime and welfare dependency. In the 1990s, by contrast, urban home ownership achieved historic highs, and poverty dropped sharply to its lowest rate since 1979. This trend was particularly pronounced in New York, where the greatest gains occurred in poor outer-borough neighborhoods.

New Orleans mayor Marc Morial captured the spirit of the urban renewal when he announced last year that the city was reviving the streetcar route along the Desire corridor. "People," he exulted, will once again "be able to ride a streetcar named Desire." "We're returning to the future." The 2000 Census suggests that cities all across America have been "returning to the future" as incubators of new businesses and catalysts of upward mobility for immigrants. Fueled by immigration, New York, Los Angeles, and Miami reached record population levels. Prosperity hit not only these and other fast-growing cities like Denver, Charlotte, and Columbus, but also so-called "dinosaurs" like Chicago, Boston, and Kansas City, all once given up for dead. Eight of the ten largest cities posted growth, and even those that continued to shrink, including Detroit, Philadelphia, and Cleveland, did so at much slower rates or in some cases nearly held even.

It would be a mistake to assume that the big cities can ever again achieve the dominant position they once held. America continues to become more suburban, as city populations continue to decline relative to their surrounding areas. For every three households that "returned" to the city, notes demographer Bill Frey, five households departed for the suburbs. Growth was fastest in overwhelmingly white exurbia, but minorities joined the move out of the cities as well. Still, as recently as the early 1990s, rising crime, welfare, and unemployment rates as well as riots in Los Angeles and New York led many to assume that central cities were dying if not already dead. What happened to turn things around? Some of the credit goes to the surging economy, some to immigration. But both of those elements were present in the 1980s and failed to spur an urban revival at that time.

Three broad social changes made an enormous difference. First, the storm created by the rise of black political power in the 1960s has largely passed. Day-to-day racial tensions have eased, and African-American leaders have been incorporated into the political classes of all the major cities. Race remains a major factor in local politics, but after three decades of black mayors, whites are far less fearful of blacks in power, and blacks have, for the most part, come to recognize that black mayors are fully capable of failing their own core constituency.

Secondly, the decline of manufacturing finally began to pay off in many cities. The reduction of manufacturing production in the past half-century occurred almost entirely within city boundaries, as nonurban manufacturing has held steady. Deindustrialization, a disaster for some cities, has been an opportunity for others to upgrade their quality of life by turning manufacturing lofts into living spaces and once-polluted waterways into recreation areas. Old manufacturing districts, like Soho in New York and Lodo in Denver, are now hip places to live. College graduates have flocked back to the center cities, which have become the place to meet other young, single twenty-somethings. Refurbished lofts and a newly developed nightlife like that of Baltimore's intriguing harbor neighborhood, Fell's Point, attract young professionals, while empty-nesters are drawn to the city's museums, restaurants, and theaters.

Many of those who work in Fell's Point are part of the software and graphics industry. The first phase of the high-tech revolution occurred largely in exurbia, but the second phase, involving designing software content, has found a natural home in the creative quarters of our older cities. Even famously conservative Cincinnati, a city torn apart by recent riots, is home to a thriving software sector.

Thirdly, retailers have discovered the untapped buying power of the underserved inner-city market. Cities have benefited from the saturation of suburban markets. One developer explained that he was looking at Brooklyn locations because "if we put up one more shopping center on the [New Jersey] Route 1 corridor, the whole place is going to sink into the ground, if it isn't killed off by traffic congestion first." Insurance companies have similarly awakened to the potential of what the Wall Street Journal has called "the last untapped insurance market in the U.S."

But these structural changes would not have brought about the resurgence of the big city in the 1990s without a concurrent reconceptualization of urban issues. Washington, D.C., mayor Marion Barry captured the essence of many 1980s mayoralties when he insisted that he should not be held accountable for the mayhem in his city. He blamed the federal government for not giving the District enough money and exclaimed, "I'm not going to let murder be the gauge, since we're not responsible for murders, we can't stop the murders." Barry's portrait of a victim mayor presiding over a victimized population was challenged in the Reagan years, but to little effect. In the summer of 1982, the Reagan administration created a firestorm with a report written by Housing and Urban Development staffer Steven Savas. Savas, a veteran of the disastrous mayoral administration of John Lindsay, used his New York experience to challenge every major assumption of 1960s urban liberalism. Guarantees of federal support, Savas wrote, have created "crippling dependency rather than initiative and independence." Federal programs, he argued, have transformed local officials "from leaders of self-reliant cities to wily stalkers of federal funds." But Savas insisted that "cities can learn to become masters of their own destinies - regardless of the level of federal support." The Savas argument was received with hostility, but it slowly gained currency. By the early 1990s, a group dubbed "the new mayors" had embraced his approach to city governance. Over the course of the 1990s, the federal government's involvement in cities declined while the cities, newly skeptical of Washington, have revived. If Barry depicted himself as a cork on the ocean, the reform mayors of the 1990s, beginning with Milwaukee's John Norquist, assumed responsibility for the condition of their cities. Denver mayor Wellington Webb encapsulated their approach when he described mayors as "CEOs," fully accountable for the performance of city government. He argued that mayors "need to bury forever the old image of mayors with a tin cup and an extended palm asking for handouts to sustain and expand cumbersome bureaucracies." Providence's roguish but enormously effective mayor Buddy Cianci summed up the change in attitude: "I've been a mayor in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, and it used to be that being a big city mayor meant being a social worker.... Now mayors are entrepreneurs."

All the new mayors recognized that the central cities would continue to lose population and jobs to their suburbs unless steps were taken to bring taxes under control and improve the quality of life. This conclusion has led to a new concern with the details of daily existence. Daley planted trees throughout the city, even on the roof of City Hall, and Cleveland's mayor Mike White attacked graffiti and potholes. John Norquist has encouraged excellence in the architectural design for new projects in Milwaukee, arguing that cities' strong suit is their public spaces. Cities offer pleasures of public life unavailable in suburbs, he notes, where "life is filtered through a two screen experience - the TV and the windshield."

Less dramatic, but almost as significant, has been the new attention paid to neighborhood vitality by mayors like Thomas Menino of Boston, Norquist, Daley, and Webb. Menino recognizes that retail is crucial to a neighborhood's revival. "You can't just do housing," he argues. "Commerce isn't the last step in a community's comeback; more often, it has to be the first." Many mayors speak of new convention centers or stadiums, but Menino endorses a different strategy. He proudly told Governing Magazine that "in the eight years I've been in office, Boston has built 12 new supermarkets." He explained that "a supermarket is the focal point of a community; you need it to get the foot traffic."

But the greatest achievement of the last decade was bringing crime under control. New York led the way through a combination of the "broken windows" policing strategy and the Comstat crime-mapping program. Broken-windows policing takes seriously small crimes, such as public drinking and urination, that can make a neighborhood seem threatening to residents and inviting to would-be felons. In the most famous example of the broken-windows approach, the New York City Transit Police began arresting turnstile jumpers in the early 1990s and found that one in seven was wanted on outstanding felony warrants. Before Comstat, a method of charting crime trends, the information that police used was sometimes weeks or even months old. Now crime patterns are tracked daily so that problems can be quickly addressed and precinct commanders held responsible for the crime rates in their districts.

Baltimore's innovative mayor Martin O'Malley has taken the Comstat principles and applied them to a range of services. In the case of sanitation, he has used the Comstat mapping principles to target emerging problems and hold district managers accountable. O'Malley's innovations have introduced an unaccustomed transparency to government agencies, whose operations were once understood only by a few insiders. Baltimore's success has led mayors and other officials from more than one hundred cities to visit and learn how it was done.

How much of the legacy of the new mayors will endure? How much of their success has been institutionalized? After a decade of strong, successful mayors, cities such as Los Angeles, Oakland, Spokane, and Cincinnati have enhanced the power of the executive office relative to city councils and school boards. The experience of recent years suggests that mayors need the authority to override the parochial interests that dominate city councils and boards of education. In Chicago, Detroit, and Philadelphia, mayors now have more power over the educational system, and New York is also likely to move in that direction. But a strong mayor doesn't guarantee a strong city: Detroit's Coleman Young ruled virtually without opposition but sent his city deeper and deeper into failure.

George Musgrove, Oakland's deputy city manager, not too long ago took an optimistic view of the future, claiming that "a movement of good government for cities has swept the country, and all good mayors - African-American, white, Latino - are governing that way." New Orleans mayor Marc Morial sounded a more cautious note: "The last few years have been tremendous for most of the mayors." But looking at the mayoral campaigns then underway in Atlanta, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Detroit, Hartford, Houston, New York, and Seattle, Morial mused that there was no guarantee that the sort of people and policies that had made for the 1990s revival would continue to hold sway. Morial was right to worry. The recent rounds of elections suggest, at best, a range of possibilities for continued urban revitalization.

Indianapolis and Philadelphia represent the best- and worst- case scenarios, respectively. With a string of four consecutive effective mayors, Indianapolis is the envy not only of misbegotten neighbor Cincinnati but of much of the country. In the 1990s, Steve Goldsmith transformed Indianapolis government by opening up city services to competition with private-sector vendors. The result has been a more efficient government, as union workers now have the opportunity to compete to perform city services. But despite his successes on services ranging from bus routes to waste-water management to the upkeep of the parks, Goldsmith had scant luck in reforming the hidebound police department and the schools, which are under an independent board of education. Democrat Bart Peterson, picking up where Goldsmith left off, is trying to circumvent the board of education by supporting charter schools. He is the first mayor in the country to be given state authorization to approve charter schools on his own.

Following the record levels of homicide of the Goldsmith era, Peterson has also promised to hire 200 more police officers over four years. But his reform efforts are likely to be hampered by a system that allows a new administration to appoint only the chief and deputy chief of police, while everyone else in the department, officers and patrolmen alike, belong to the same strong union.

In Philadelphia, by contrast, the reform impetus of the 1990s, already fading during the second term of Mayor Ed Rendell, has been replaced by a return to patronage and process-driven politics. Rendell saved Philadelphia from collapse, but whether he permanently altered the city's self-defeating political culture is not yet clear.

In the early 1990s, Mayor Rendell made a reputation for himself as an urban reformer by rescuing Philadelphia - which was losing jobs and population - from near bankruptcy. This was a city that had raised taxes 19 times in 11 years, and in which municipal workers could take off one workday in five. Rendell knew that Philadelphia's traditional patronage politics had come to a dead end. He faced down the city's powerful unions, which he said hadn't "had a bad day in 30 years," by trimming paid holidays and eliminating work rules that required, for example, three workers to change a light bulb at the city-owned airport.

But successor John Street, who was elected in 1999 with the support of those same unions and interest groups, has shown little inclination to buck the city's permanent political class. Street, the city's second African-American mayor, was elected by the same racially mixed public-sector coalition that former tough-guy mayor Frank Rizzo tried to put together just before his death in 1991. Mayor Street is a brilliant tactician and negotiator. But while his allies and donors are doing well, Philadelphia as a whole has very little to show for the first two years of his administration.

Philadelphia lost 68,000 people - 4 percent of its population - in the 1990s. Ten percent of the city's land is unoccupied, and about 14,000 abandoned buildings blight the landscape. The obstacles to redeveloping abandoned land for new uses are numerous. Before confronting the city's rococo zoning rules and permit processes, a prospective builder must get legal possession of the abandoned lots. According to the Philadelphia Daily News, "Anyone wanting to take over a tax-delinquent vacant lot in Philadelphia must go through 54 steps at 12 agencies, a process that takes at least two years and often many more. The job is only slightly easier if the city already owns the lot: 39 steps at nine agencies." If persistent enough to acquire the land, builders will then face labor costs that make construction 60 to 80 percent more expensive than in the suburbs. And after overcoming all those hurdles, they will find that the building-trades member of the zoning board - an ally of Mayor Street and a representative of the sheet-metal workers - requires that all new homes, no matter how modest in price, have central air-conditioning.

But instead of acknowledging the obvious fact that the city's permit and zoning system is designed to produce public-sector jobs rather than new construction, Street and the city council got bogged down in a lengthy fight over control of the money set aside for cleaning abandoned lots and buildings. Street wanted council permission to float $250 million worth of bonds before receiving public or city-council sanction. But the council, well aware of Street's history on this matter, balked. As Rendell's council president, Street had controlled Philadelphia's empowerment-zone monies. He produced consulting contracts and several large holes in the ground, but virtually no new development. In fact, the population inside Philadelphia's empowerment zone dropped 17 percent in the 1990s, or four times the city's overall rate of decline, despite an infusion of $79 million in federal funds. Suspicions were therefore aroused that the blight money was intended largely for Street's friends and donors. The mayor himself, never bashful on this point, has explained that "the people who support me in the general election have a greater chance of getting business from my administration."

Mayor Street appears to view all policy choices through a special-interest lens. This year the state threatened a takeover of the city's violence-ridden, financially bankrupt school system, in which fewer than half of the students graduate and the teachers' workday is among the shortest in the country. Street initially welcomed the takeover as a chance for reform. But when the NAACP, the strike-prone teachers, and the contractors and suppliers objected, Street changed his tune. His staff and allies devised a secret plan to subvert reform. The 67-page plan explained how Street could undermine the state by shifting key educators to the city payroll to "cripple" school operations. But the report warned that the city must "avoid the public perception that the mayor does not care about improving education and is using the city's schoolchildren as pawns in a political power struggle."

Street largely succeeded in derailing major school reform. The new school commission run by the city and the state quickly moved to divide the spoils by awarding $675,000 worth of consulting and legal contracts to Pennsylvania Republicans and Street's Democratic backers. But Street's "victory" so aroused the ire of the state legislature that limited change in the form of several new charter schools will now go ahead. In the words of one Philadelphia insider, "School reform has gone from promising to fraudulent to weak."

After Street's early manipulation of school-reform politics, a local political insider claimed that "John Street has just removed the last obstacle to his reelection in two years." But in March, 2002 the overconfident mayor provoked an unexpected civic storm by announcing that he was suspending the small scheduled reductions in the city's onerous wage tax. This levy gives Philadelphia the highest family-tax burden in the country. Economists at the Federal Reserve estimate that Philadelphia has lost more than 200,000 jobs to the wage tax since 1970. During the 1990s, when other cities were enjoying an employment boom, Philadelphia lost 33,662 private-sector jobs.

With his announcement, Street ignited a very public fight with the usually moribund business leadership. Philadelphia politics is defined by an exquisite cynicism: Columnists brag that the city is a model of democracy because everyone can afford the $10 bribes necessary to buy off city plumbing inspectors. But when the mayor insisted that even a small tax cut would lead to library and recreation-center closings and possibly even a shortage of police bullets, he tapped an unexpected wellspring of anger in a city where the population has shrunk even as the city workforce continues to grow. The city chamber of commerce, its members shod in wing-tipped loafers, led a march on city hall that was joined by Teamsters and a bevy of black ministers. Loudspeakers blared the Beatles' "Taxman" and "Revolution" and, of course, the theme from Rocky. Conceding that the wage tax "has become symbolic of something that is fundamentally wrong with our city and its tax structure," Street backed off and allowed the tax cut to go through.

To Street's surprise, it wasn't possible to go all the way back to business as usual. The rising expectations produced by the Rendell years had become a factor to be reckoned with. But even with the tiny cuts in the wage tax restored, Philadelphia is still uncompetitive. And it remains uncertain whether this will be the end of tax relief or the beginning of a more promising future.

Richard Riordan, who became mayor of Los Angeles in 1992, restored the confidence of his riot-torn city. In the early 1990s, Los Angeles was struck by a series of blows. The city was particularly hard hit by the 1991 recession, which coincided with the end of the Cold War and a sharp decline in the area's defense employment. The administration of Tom Bradley, mayor since 1973, was shaken by scandals. Additionally, in a city where the two-party system usually refers to the mayor's party and the police chief's party, Bradley and his police chief - the imperious Daryl Gates - were not on good terms. They hadn't spoken for a year when the 1992 Los Angeles riots broke out, and their feud left the city government paralyzed.

Riordan, a businessman with a long history of civic involvement, inherited a dispirited city and an office with sharply limited powers. Los Angeles had a uniquely organized city government - a strong council, a commission system that ran the port and the water and power systems, and a police chief who was virtually independent. But Riordan used his limited powers to calm and reassure the city. He recognized that the loss of military contractors, as well as other major corporations, meant the city was going to have to pay a great deal more attention to small and medium-sized businesses. He was particularly effective at restoring business confidence by reducing the red tape that had built up during Bradley's long reign.

Despite his campaign promises, Riordan was never able to bring the LAPD up to full strength. Demoralized by the 1992 Rodney King riots, rogue cops, threats of a federal consent decree, and intense hostility between the chief and the police union, the force was perennially short-staffed. Los Angeles has roughly 40 percent of New York's population, but only about 21 percent of the Big Apple's police officers. Riordan spoke with admiration of New York's broken-windows and Comstat policing but was never able to push through similar reforms in Los Angeles. Riordan was successful, however, in using his own considerable fortune to win public approval of a new charter that expanded the powers of the mayoralty. The 1999 city charter limited the executive power of the city council and gave the mayor the ability to replace department heads, subject to a council veto. It represented, asserted the Los Angeles Times, "the most profound change in the structure of government since the 1920s." Furthermore, the office of the police chief was stripped of its right to tenure and was made subject to oversight by a police commission, which now can terminate the chief's contract after a five-year term.

By restructuring the institutions of city government, the new charter held out the promise of continued reform. But Riordan's chosen heir, Republican businessman Steve Soboroff, was eliminated in the first round of the 2001 nonpartisan primary. Neither of two leading candidates, Democrat James Hahn, a cautious career politician whose father had been a great favorite of African-American voters, nor the charismatic Antonio Villaraigosa, a former state assembly speaker bidding to be the city's first Latino mayor, campaigned on the continuation of Riordan's policies. Instead, both invoked the memory of the late Tom Bradley.

The year 2001 was an important one for Los Angeles. The city was to elect a new mayor, a new controller, and new city attorney, and, due to term limits, six of eleven council members. Furthermore, the city had gone through an unprecedented demographic change. Over the course of 40 years, Los Angeles had been transformed from the whitest major city in the United States to a city with a Latino majority.

After the first round of voting, it appeared that Villaraigosa would be the victor. Backed by a labor-Latino alliance, the candidate spoke of using the mayor's enhanced powers to remake the city. "Villaraigosa," explained influential journalist Harold Meyerson, promised to turn "Los Angeles into the next great proving ground for American progressivism, the place where the great wave of new immigrants stakes its claim on the nation's conscience, bounty and future." But it was a false denouement. Villaraigosa was defeated in the run-off by Hahn, who assembled a mesalliance of black voters from South Los Angeles and white moderates from the San Fernando Valley.

Hahn, who grew up as a part of the political class of this apolitical city, has continued and even enhanced policies designed by Riordan that aimed at supporting small businesses. But Hahn's tenuous electoral coalition has fractured. The perennial contest for control over the police department has roiled his relationship with blacks, even as a strong secession movement suggests that much of the city assumes that Los Angeles is unreformable.

Los Angeles, with its 466 square miles, is de facto a regional city. The downtown area, where city government is located, is only one of a half-dozen business centers and is remote from the lives of most people. Like Riordan, Hahn was elected with the support of the San Fernando Valley, which is separated from the rest of the city by a low-lying mountain chain. The Valley sees itself as forever shortchanged when it comes to city services, comparing unfavorably the services it receives with those in the nearby small cities of Burbank, Glendale, and Pasadena, where city government is accessible and responsive. Like Riordan, Hahn has paid lip service to Valley concerns, and in the campaign, he implied that he would stay neutral in the secession fight. But as mayor, Hahn has aligned himself with the city's public-sector unions, which bitterly oppose a divorce, eliciting cries of betrayal. As of mid March of this year, polls show that support for secession has grown by 10 percent and now leads 55 to 36 percent in the Valley and 46 to 38 percent in the city as a whole. There is even a growing secession movement in Hahn's home territory, the port neighborhood of San Pedro.

Secessionists are not the only ones crying foul. The crime rate, driven by a revival of gang activity, is rising rapidly. But this has been overshadowed by the hostilities between two of Hahn's core constituencies, African Americans and the Police Protective League (PPL). Hahn, who seems unaware of, and uninterested in, the methods that have made other cities more successful in reducing crime, promised both to retain African-American Bernard Parks as police chief and to grant the PPL a three-day work week. But the PPL has been at war with Parks, who has cited 6,000 of the 9,000 officers for one infraction or another. Hahn has had personal difficulties with Parks, who often overshadows him, and ultimately sided with the PPL, agreeing not to reappoint Parks. His once-loyal black supporters were angered, seeing his decision as a dangerous erosion of their political power.

In other cities these two developments might produce enormous turmoil. Hahn supporters fear that an alliance between anti-Hahn secessionists and blacks angry over Parks's dismissal might allow the secessionists to break away. But government tends to be at best a secondary matter in this sunshine city where politics is derided as a profession for people without the good looks to make it in the movies. Hahn, who to date has made but limited use of his enhanced powers, seems to have little in the way of an agenda other than hanging on. If he falters, he may be replaced in the next election by the new city attorney Rocky Delgadillo, a Latino centrist. Delgadillo, who appeals to African Americans, has a strong probusiness agenda and has promoted New York-style police practices.

In Detroit, the successor administration has been slow to reveal its character. It remains to be seen whether the reforms of former mayor Dennis Archer will be sustained, let alone advanced. Detroit's population had declined from 2 million in 1950 to a little under 1 million in 2000, but like Philadelphia, the city caught a bit of the 1990s rising tide. The city Archer inherited from five-term mayor Coleman Young in 1993 was near collapse. The government barely functioned: "When I walked into the city hall," Archer has commented, "I didn't even have a computer. We still had rotary dial phones in some departments." But that was hardly the worst of it. Coleman Young, who liked to think of himself as a "badass," had taken pleasure in cursing at the suburbanites beyond Eight Mile road, whom he accused of "pillaging the city." They returned the sentiment in kind, leaving Detroit economically isolated. Young was similarly hostile to the police, arguing that "crime is a problem but not the problem. The police are the major threat ... to the minority community." Murder and arson soared. As one observer put it, "It is as if the [1967] riot never ended, but goes on in slow motion."

Young created a cult of personality, but he was never able to deliver basic services - the city didn't even plow residential streets after snowstorms. The subject of numerous federal investigations, Young was never found guilty of anything, though his former police chief, the chief's top deputy, and a Young business partner were convicted of embezzling about $2.5 million each from a Detroit Police Department fund. Detroit's downtown was so vacant that it was proposed that the empty skyscrapers be turned into a necropolis, a monument to urban failure. When the city cut back on power for lighting to save money, people joked that the "last one to leave should turn off the lights."

Unlike Young, Archer consistently maintained a high standard of conduct and kept his administration largely free of scandals. He reduced Detroit's growth-stunting business and income taxes and balanced its budgets. He put the city's fiscal house in order, rescuing it from near junk-bond status. Archer's most important accomplishment was to reconnect Detroit to the surrounding region. He enticed General Motors and the Compuware Corporation to move their headquarters into downtown Detroit, bringing back more than 10,000 jobs. The city's baseball team, the Tigers, has returned to the downtown, and its football team, the Lions, is soon to follow. Archer also repaired relations with both the state government, which responded with "brownfields" legislation, making it easier to clean up polluted industrial sites, and with the local county governments, which pitched in to help Detroit when it was unable to cope with a major snowstorm.

But for all this progress, Detroit still can't plow its streets. Having foresworn competitive bidding to appease the city's powerful unions, Archer struggled to improve city services. He pushed through a $10 million modernization of the streetlight system, boosting the number of working lights from 60 percent to 95 percent. But when he left office, more than a third of the city's traffic signals were still out of commission. Archer was also unable to reform a police department that leads the country in fatal shootings, in a city that is near the top in homicides. Detroit's crime statistics are so unreliable that the FBI has refused to include them in its uniform crime surveys. And in June of 2000, Detroit suffered a two-day blackout when the city-owned power system failed.

Like Philadelphia, Detroit has a massive government of 44 departments, built up when the city's population was far larger. Archer has made some progress in straightening out the land titles for the city's 44,000 abandoned lots. But as in Philadelphia, getting a title is only the start of a builder's problems, as some 350 different permits, issued by 11 different city agencies, are required. In addition, 5 separate agencies issue 83 different licenses, and responsibility for environmental inspections is split among 13 operations across 6 departments. In short, as Archer's successor Kwame Kilpatrick enters office, Detroit still hasn't decided whether city government exists to provide jobs for organized interests or services to citizens.

Kilpatrick won the mayoralty this past November in an election dominated not by Archer's incremental achievements but by the long shadow of Coleman Young. Archer, a Catholic in a city of Baptists, was dogged by charges that he "wasn't black enough," and was always more popular in the suburbs than at home. He was even subject to a failed recall effort in 1999. Neither Kilpatrick nor his rival, former police officer Gil Hill, talked about building on what he had achieved. The public, explained Bill Johnson of the Detroit News, "still buys Coleman Young's argument that the psychic benefits of a black autonomy outweigh the material gains of rejoining the region." To underscore that point in the midst of the mayoral election, the city council unanimously voted to create a holiday honoring Coleman Young.

The 31-year-old Kilpatrick, the country's youngest big-city mayor, is a former star football player who comes from the city's leading political family. His mother is a congresswoman, his father a key adviser to the Wayne County executive. He worked well with Republicans when he was House minority leader in Lansing, earning a reputation as a moderate. But running for mayor in Detroit, Kilpatrick found it necessary to establish his Coleman Young credentials by blasting his home state as "the Mississippi of the north."

Kilpatrick enjoys the backing of the business community, but with the auto economy slumping and Ford laying off workers, he has a formidable task ahead. He enters office with a growing budget deficit and a host of union contracts up for renewal. In his inaugural address, the crowd responded with enthusiasm when Kilpatrick promised to root out city workers with a "quit-and-stay mentality" - those who, as he put it, "quit a long time ago, but they come to work every single day." But it's not clear how he can accomplish this, having won office with the backing of public-sector unions and having all but promised never to submit city services to managed competition.

If the new mayor sticks to his campaign platform, it is likely that Detroit will revert once again to being Coleman Young's city. But there are some indications that Kilpatrick, a man with higher ambitions, might surprise. Jerry Oliver, his choice to head the dysfunctional police force, told the press that public-sector "unions are about maintaining the status quo and mediocrity." Kilpatrick himself has made a point of firing very publicly city workers caught on camera goofing off on the job. To date, notes George Cantor of the Detroit News, Kilpatrick "has been successful at symbolism," but the city is "waiting to see what the substance of the administration will be like."

The mayor who most inspired these others was New York's Rudy Giuliani. Giuliani exerted an enormous influence on American cities through New York's broken-windows policing and its Comstat computer-tracking model, which has been adapted by other cities for a wide range of services. But these successes were only the precondition for his greatest achievement, the restoration of upward mobility as the social norm in New York. Before Giuliani, New York politics was mostly about striking caring poses. Giuliani's predecessors, from John Lindsay to David Dinkins, spoke endlessly of what the city owed the poor but delivered instead rising rates of crime and welfare.

Dinkins' New York was organized around the unspoken assumption that poverty was a permanent condition, and that the best that could be done was to make it bearable. In Giuliani's words, "We blocked the genius of America for the poorest people in New York." Under Giuliani, the city restored the ideal of upward mobility. Giuliani spoke not only of the rights of the poor but also of their obligations to society. As mayor, he delivered greater safety and a rising standard of living in the city's most blighted areas, from Mott Haven in the South Bronx to Brooklyn's East New York. New York's poorest neighborhoods experienced the sharpest drop in crime and the biggest rises in income and property values. None of this was predestined. No other city has made comparable gains, let alone sustained them. New York's crime rates continue to decline even as they have been rising in other big cities. Turning the tables on those who would substitute intentions for outcomes, writer James Traub has asked of Giuliani's critics, "Isn't preserving people's lives, well-being, and property the most compassionate policy of all?"

But Giuliani cultivated no heir. Near the end of a mayoral campaign overshadowed by the terrorist attacks and the war in Afghanistan, he endorsed the eventual victor, billionaire Michael Bloomberg. A lifelong Democrat and a self-proclaimed liberal, Bloomberg spent his way to the Republican nomination and went on to burn through a record-shattering $75 million (plus untold dollars in the form of charitable donations) in the course of defeating the favorite, Democrat Mark Green. Insulated from criticism and scrutiny by a wall of money and advisors, Bloomberg put together a mesalliance easily as strange as that which elected Hahn in Los Angeles. He won the votes both of Giuliani's most fervent admirers and his angriest detractors. One of these partners is likely to be disappointed.

The new mayor, who has brought a gentler style to City Hall, has made a point of stressing cooperation and partnership whenever he speaks. To date, this emphasis on teamwork seems to be paying off. His efforts to cut the $4.8 billion budget deficit produced by the stock-market slowdown, the destruction of the World Trade Center, and the cost of new hires brought on in Giuliani's second term, have brought what for New York is a relatively minor reaction. Bloomberg's pledge to impose no new broad-based taxes has drawn uncharacteristically mild criticism from the city council, which is dominated by representatives of public-sector unions and social-service agencies funded by the city.

Bloomberg has reached out to interests shut out of City Hall during the Giuliani years, and he has, for the most part, continued Giuliani's policing practices. The mayor will no doubt use his personal fortune, estimated at $4 billion, to keep many of the city's often ferocious interest groups in his corner, through ongoing "charitable" donations. Like Nelson Rockefeller, he has his own system of rewards and punishment independent of the public treasury.

The new mayor's first big policy initiative and the first major test of his consensual style has been his continuation of Giuliani's fight to abolish the dysfunctional board of education. The board, which has seen its funding rise from $8 to $12 billion annually over the past four years to little educational effect, has been described by Bloomberg as a "rinky-dink operation." But in order to assume mayoral control, Bloomberg needs the cooperation of the state legislature, traditionally a handmaiden to the city's powerful teachers' union. His effort is also complicated by the fact that the teachers' contract is up for renegotiation. Bloomberg declares that his administration should be judged in large measure by its educational achievements. It's a fair measure, and his commitment partially undercuts those critics who worry that by softening the hard edges of "Rudyism," Bloomberg may revert to treating the poor with the paternalism and condescension associated with Nelson Rockefeller and John Lindsay in the 1960s. But if Bloomberg's cooperative approach fails, he may have little choice but to return to a Rudy-style politics.

The reform mayors of the 1990s made a sharp break with the past. Once-standard arguments that poverty was the root cause of urban problems, and that therefore crime could not be reduced until poverty was eliminated, largely fell by the wayside. With the declining crime rates and the broad national prosperity of the 1990s, poverty became less a proof of oppression than evidence of failed social and economic policies.

While reform currents have been slowed in some cities, they are unlikely to be entirely displaced. The new urban reformism has no ideological competition. Some of the policy successes of the 1990s in the areas of taxes, policing, and welfare reform have come under attack, but the critics have offered little in the way of alternatives. Furthermore, as in Philadelphia, the 1990s awakening created a change in expectations, an updraft, that makes citizens less likely to accept ongoing failure. Cincinnati, for instance, looks with envy at the success of nearby Indianapolis, while Detroiters talk about how it's done in Cleveland.

Still, some mayors and cities will continue to fail. It is hard to be optimistic about the future of Philadelphia and Detroit, where the gravitational pull of a patronage-driven parochialism - more intent on preserving old jobs than creating new ones - may be too strong for mayors to escape from its orbit. It may be that the reforms of the 1990s will turn out to be merely an Indian summer in those cities where failed political cultures undermine the self-correcting mechanisms of democracy. But failure now exacts a political price. In both Philadelphia and Detroit, state governments have shown an increasing willingness to take over city institutions such as schools, parking authorities, and the courts.

For nearly 70 years - from roughly 1920 to 1990 - the broad trends of American life ran against the country's big cities. Federal efforts to bolster urban areas in the 1960s tended to make matters worse, as cities waited passively for the federal government to rescue them. In the 1990s, the tides shifted and urban America, once stranded, rejoined the rest of the country. A new generation of mayors stopped relying on Washington and broke out of old orthodoxies. In those cities that remain on the path of self-reliance and economic growth, progress will continue.