Regardless of the ultimate merits of the strategy, Rendell and Cohen had a right to feel a sense of satisfaction. In 1996, for the first time in seven years, the city actually posted a gain of jobs. It came to precisely one hundred, .001 percent of the 104,000 that had been lost in the previous decade, but it did suggest a change in the trend. Further proof of that came in the first three months of 1997 when the number of jobs in the city increased by 3,300.
“I feel amazingly fulfilled,” said Cohen, poring over the contents of his desk. “We have succeeded beyond any reasonable expectation.” But he also knew that the city, like all American cities, was still on a tightrope. The infinitesimal growth of jobs had occurred in the midst of a national economy that some described as the strongest since World War II, and Cohen knew what would happen if that resurgence suddenly veered in a different direction. “One little downturn in the economy and we’re back to two percent job loss a year,” he said. “We have fought so hard and the best we can say is that we’re right on the edge. The city is poised for greatness and it is also poised to spiral down—taxes, jobs, and people.”
In fact, despite the optimism that Cohen expressed, the city was still continuing to spiral down in many ways, the cancer still creeping. On the basis of new census data, the city’s population loss between 1990 and 1996 had totaled roughly 105,000, or 6.8 percent, and various projections pointed toward continued decline through the end of the decade. There were some who argued that population loss was actually good for the city, enabling it to retool and scale down and provide new housing more in keeping with the suburban trends that had come to define the desires and habits of so many millions. But those leaving the city were the very ones the city desperately needed to keep. As a story in the Inquirer pointed out, aggregate tax returns for the years 1992, 1993, and 1994 showed that $1.6 billion in income had moved out of Philadelphia to the surrounding suburbs while the amount the city took in from the suburbs totaled $680 million.
New census data made available in 1997 only further underscored the alarming increase in the city’s poverty rate. The new figures showed that it had risen to a minimum of 23 percent and perhaps went as high as 31 percent, meaning that nearly a third of the entire city, a third, might be below the poverty line. For children the figures were far more distressing, anywhere between 29 percent and 52 percent. And none of this was unique to Philadelphia, but right in line with increases that had occurred in Brooklyn and the Bronx and Detroit and Chicago and Los Angeles.
There was no mystery as to why people were leaving the city. Regardless of what Rendell had accomplished, the city’s pull was still almost purely an emotional one. Those who stayed did so on the basis of loyalty, or because of a job, or because the qualities that had turned so many away from cities were the very qualities that enticed them—difference, diversity, diversion. By any economic basis, the basis on which most people made decisions, the city was still noncompetitive with its surrounding suburbs to the point of impotence. Taxes were still far too high. The perception of crime, far more corrosive than actual crime figures themselves, had not been ameliorated. The school system continued to flop and flounder and had the trust of no one, in large part because of endemic problems, but also because the mayor, cowed by the politics, had never brought to the schools anywhere near the intensity that he had given to the union negotiations, or the budget, or economic development. Those who went to a public school in the city had little faith. Those who did not were forced to pay the burden of the city’s greatest hidden tax—private and parochial schools—until they could no longer afford it, or got tired of affording it, and moved across the boundary.
Every bit as corrosive for the city were the man-made acts of venality and selfishness. The racial politics that had been displayed during the first term made easy decisions difficult and fractious. The extortionate threats of every self-interest group imaginable, vowing to heap embarrassment and woe on the mayor if he didn’t do exactly what they wanted, had a similar impact, to the point where the public interest often seemed irrelevant. The pettiness of politics, the insecurity and spite that can develop from jealousy and over-the-shoulder looks to the next election, had never been more evident than in the lost opportunity for a new shipyard. For corporate America, the city had become a potential source of opportunity, not because they believed in the city, but because they knew exactly the chain of desperation that would be set off in the mayor’s office the very second a threat was made to leave. Then there were the chilling effects of state and federal policy.
The state and federal governments were easy villains almost to the point of cliché, and Rendell himself, at the very beginning of his first term, realized that the city had absolutely no standing to ask for help unless it cleaned up its own fiscal mess. The city had done that, and coupled with the boom in the national economy, some sort of sustained job growth did seem possible. The mayor had spent enough time in the state capital and the nation’s capital to know that any kind of massive help was as fine a dream as his growing hair, so he had adopted a minimalist philosophy: if you’re not going to help us, then please just leave us alone.
But in the summer of 1996 came the funnel cloud of welfare reform, fueled by that terrifying force known as a presidential election year, and there were estimates that the city would have to create 28,000 jobs to handle the cutoff in benefits that was being proposed. Such job creation might be possible in places where there was a combination of a prosperous economy and innovative welfare policy on the state level, but as a report from an organization called Public/Private Ventures noted, “Philadelphia benefits from neither.”
The city had an overall unemployment rate of 7 percent, but the unemployment rate for low-skilled workers was 16 percent and for laborers 21 percent, and the effects of welfare reform might increase the citywide rate to 11 percent. Such a projection might well be subject to the calculus of self-serving doomsday catastrophe, but there was no debate that welfare reform would have a devastating impact on the city. Given the inchlike progress that had been made after the mayor himself had spent hundreds of hours on economic development, the idea of the city now being told to go out and find tens of thousands of jobs was sadistic. There was also the damaging psychological impact, the image of a city with a faint and tenuous toehold on the hill not falling back on its own but of being kicked to the bottom.
Rendell’s optimism had been more than just a trait of personality. It had changed the entire feel of the city, to the point where the perpetual focus wasn’t on the litany of problems, but on what just maybe, maybe, could be done. It was always a precarious perch, but Rendell had managed to sustain the momentum, as if by constantly talking about all that might be coming and planning for it as if it were already here, it somehow was already here. In a way he wasn’t America’s Mayor but America’s first publicly elected cult leader, winning the hearts and minds of hundreds of thousands on the basis of what Mike McGovern described as “blind faith.”
“Realistically, I feel that the heart of the problem still exists,” said McGovern in summing up his feelings about the city. “The infrastructure, the flight of the middle class, the breakdown of the neighborhoods, the loss of jobs, the lack of a decent educational system. But as contradictory as it sounds, I still have a lot of hope and optimism. There is an infectious, contagious optimism about the town. A lot of it is attributable to Ed’s relentless cheerleading.” The effect of welfare reform—or welfare repeal as some more accurately described it—could undo all the energy of that hope, and in the summer of 1996, with the legislation still pending, Rendell had appealed to the president in a letter:
The legislation before Congress demands work but does not produce jobs. In Philadelphia, we are already struggling to find work for dislocated workers, people with extensive and recent work experience. For example, with your help, we are desperately struggling with the task of finding meaningful new jobs for over eight thousand dislocated workers from the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard. In the
face of the demands that those on welfare in our city go to work or face an abrupt cutoff of benefits, we must therefore ask: “Where are the jobs?”
“We have not been hit that hard yet,” said Cohen of the impact of welfare reform, which had now become actual law and ended the federal guarantee of aid to the poor. “I have no doubt it’s coming, and it’s coming in a serious way.” But he still described himself as relentlessly optimistic, not simply because of the new hotel and restaurant deals that were blossoming and unfolding, but because he was convinced of the very sanctity of the American city, confident that it had a place in the nation’s landscape too valuable to sacrifice. “I know a region cannot survive without its core city,” he said. “If the city goes down, the region goes down.” The immediate effect of such a total implosion, he said, would be a 25 percent drop in the property values of the surrounding areas, and no suburbanite, however far he had fled to the western edge of the metroplex, would ever stand for that. But he also knew it was a speculative prediction, and what he said next was as disturbing as it was chilling: that the only way to prove the worth of the American city would be through the complete collapse of one.
Then, and only then, as those property values plummeted and suburbanites who thought they were safe were not safe at all, would politicians and voters see why cities must be preserved, not out of moral obligation but out of necessity. “What scares me is, I’m not sure that a major city [isn’t] going to have to implode to prove the point, and you sure as hell don’t want it to be your city.” In the painful race that American cities had been running for the past half-century, up and down, hot and not, on the edge and barely above the surface even in the most bountiful of times, he saw Washington, D.C., as the most likely candidate for obliteration. Given his doomsday theory, he actually considered that good news. To a certain degree, it was always comforting to know that there was someplace out there in even worse shape than you were in. More important, he hoped that the dysfunctional condition of the nation’s capital would finally force those whose influence went far beyond its borders to enact real change nationwide and give cities the footing they needed to be economically competitive.
There were innumerable shifts that could be made without havoc or wasteful billions. The creation of the suburban era in American life wasn’t accidental or the result of social inevitability. People left the city for the suburbs because they were given the economic wherewithal by the federal government through the creation of the modern mortgage and the home tax deduction. They left because they could afford it, because there was government-engineered incentive to leave, and cities could be sustained and rebuilt in the very same way.
At the specific request of the White House, Rendell spent months working on a document called the New Urban Agenda that he unveiled at the National Press Club in Washington in April 1994. He suggested a host of practical ideas that didn’t involve money, but changes in federal policy that, as he wrote, “can help cities without having a significant impact on [the federal] budget.” Among the suggestions: an agreement that 15 percent of all federal procurement be purchased from firms located in urban empowerment zones; the elimination of unfunded mandates that in the case of the American Disabilities Act, for example, would cost the city $140 million in curb cuts and ramps; streamlining policy to help cities rid themselves of the environmental nightmares of its abandoned factories; restoration of the tax credit for historic rehabilitation.
The proposal giving distressed urban areas a preference in federal procurement was acted upon. Steps were also being taken to ease the red tape for clearing abandoned factories and for reducing unfunded mandates. But the historic rehabilitation tax credit had not been revived. Nor had another initiative Rendell had suggested, the creation of a federal capital budget to rebuild the urban infrastructure. Nor had simple changes in the tax code to further spur private investment and the creation of jobs. “The New Urban Agenda is no panacea, nor is it guaranteed to make cities succeed,” Rendell had written. “What is certain, however, is that without it or some other significant help, cities will surely fail.”
They were honest words, spoken from the vantage point of someone who had seen the sorrow over and over—the homeless man wrapped in rags on the rim of the perfectly sculpted fountain; the son in the relentless light of the hospital waiting room who wanted to know why, why, his father had been killed in the line of duty, the little girl who had taken his hand on the shabby block of Stella and asked for a swimming pool. The statistics alone—a city that in twenty-five years had lost over a quarter-million jobs, a city that in twenty-five years had lost 30 percent of its tax base—described a place that had already lost one of its limbs to cancer. But still his words to some degree were seen as exaggeration, another mayor just crying wolf.
Cohen himself, expanding upon a model that was being considered for Washington, D.C., had a tantalizing suggestion: a federal tax credit of 10 percent for all residents of cities that were officially deemed to be distressed on the basis of such established criteria as mortality, poverty rates, and unemployment. Such a credit would immediately offset the taxes that so many cities levied on residents and businesses to remain solvent. Just as important, it would encourage those of means to return to the city not on the basis of emotion or culture or entertainment but on the basis that had the only real chance of working in America—a direct appeal to the pocketbook. It could potentially bring to cities what they needed the most, not just changes in the tax code or job-creation money or federal procurement, but the infectious and electric surge of human capital that is the first step in all turnarounds and miracles.
It was an idea, an intriguing idea, but in the tenor of the country, it seemed likely to remain exactly that. Soccer moms and soccer dads were the latest political obsession, and it was their needs that set the agenda. Given the reconstituted downtown of the American city, streets paved with the newest standard of health—Disney and Niketown and Hard Rock Cafe and Planet Hollywood and Starbucks and megaplex movie theaters with enough screens to entertain an entire neighborhood for two hours—there was a perception that cities had turned the corner into good times anyway.
There were positive signs. Reported major crimes dropped 3 percent nationwide in 1996, including 14 percent in New York and 12 percent in Los Angeles. Beyond crime, community development groups, proving the miracle of persistence, had built new housing in areas of cities around the country that seemed beyond hope. But these changes were blips, not sustained trends. The idea that cities had come close to reversing themselves was dangerously misleading, ignorant of poverty rates; ignorant of the timeline of decline that occurred not just for five years but for nearly fifty; ignorant of social and racial stratification; ignorant of the types of jobs that the audience economy threw off; ignorant of what would happen in the next recession when the disposable dollars of tourists and suburbanites were no longer disposable. There was also the danger that what lay behind the fancy wrap of the downtown, the gray areas of abandoned factories and worn-out neighborhoods, had been rendered invisible, the Bermuda Triangle of American life.
The movers came at 1:30 P.M., and an hour later had carted out Cohen’s desk, bookcase, round table, and pictures. It left him in the awkward position of working in an office that now had nothing in it except for a golf putter, a rolled-up Oriental carpet, a stale-looking couch, and a hard-backed wooden chair. Undeterred, Cohen stood at the credenza by the window and continued to work. He fielded a call about the school board, and he described to a well-wisher how he was now standing in an office that had virtually no furniture in it. At 4:15 P.M., he gave up his six-shooter, his beeper, and noted, almost like recalling the first words of his children, that it was the mayor who had made the final beep. There was something fitting about that, a perfect beginning-and-end symmetry in their working relationship. Cohen was moving only several blocks away, and he would continue to serve in a highly active role as an advisor. He still had the keys to City Hall, and given his loyalty to Rend
ell, he would always be on call.
But Cohen would have a different object of obsession now, the law firm of Ballard Spahr. Inevitably ethical conflicts would arise that would make it impossible for Cohen to dispense advice even if he wanted to. The mayor, as hard as he tried to convince himself that Cohen really wasn’t going very far, knew how different it would be. During the course of a given day in the second floor right angle of City Hall where they had toiled, they had actually seen quite little of each other. But the presence of Cohen, willing to work forty-eight hours a day if only Congress would pass the necessary legislation, provided a comfort as steady as a lighthouse. In a literal sense the light of Cohen’s office had always been on, the one precious square of dependability in the architectural cuckoo’s nest of City Hall. In a city that had spent so much of its modern history in varying degrees of chaos and conflict, the uplift of that was immeasurable. Or as the mayor himself put it, “The best thing about David was that he was always there.”
Rendell had no choice but to carry on. The intensity of his mission had not diminished, but there were inevitable questions about what he would do with his own future once his second term expired. By city charter he could not seek reelection as mayor. Running for statewide office was a possibility, governor or senator, but Rendell himself wasn’t sure if he had the burning desire to mount another massive campaign. He talked about maybe heading a foundation, or going into business with his son. He even mused about becoming baseball commissioner, and his name had already been touted in the press. Given his encyclopedic knowledge of sports and his unique ability to massage egos, it was a job that suited him perfectly. But it seemed unimaginable for Rendell to leave his natural habitat of politics. However he had come by it, wherever he had gained it, he had the rare gift of public leadership, and it was far too essential to be sacrificed to a ball and a bat.
A Prayer for the City Page 49