NEWS ANALYSIS : Plight of Cities Again on U.S. Back Burner

Six short months ago, as riots terrorized Los Angeles and threatened to spread to other cities across the country, America’s attention was riveted on a long-neglected topic: the decay of once-great urban centers and the smoldering problems within them.

For a few fleeting moments, it was as if a window had flown wide open after being frozen shut for years. Political leaders dusted off the hoary notion of an urban agenda. The nightly news bristled with tales from the inner city. Many Americans hoped that, somehow, the stubborn dilemmas of crime and poverty that so dehumanize urban life would be tackled with a renewed public will.

Yet except for a flurry of local efforts, nothing much has happened at all. What was touted as a major post-riot urban aid bill has been transformed by Congress into an unrecognizable mishmash of tax breaks, including benefits for the affluent, that remains in political limbo. As the horror of the riots recedes in people’s memories, public attention has turned elsewhere--to the presidential election, the economy and other concerns.

And now, just half a year after a nation watched horrifying scenes from Los Angeles played over and over on its TV screens, some advocates of the cities fear the window of opportunity has slammed shut once again. “It takes more than one riot to get people’s attention, particularly when people are preoccupied with other things and when there’s a huge argument over whether anything will do any good,” said Edwin Dorn, a researcher at the Brookings Institution in Washington.

Consider urban aid. In the first, emotion-charged days after the riot, House leaders discussed a huge, $9-billion to $12-billion emergency package. But the move faded swiftly from a lack of broad support, and all that became law was a separate, $1.1-billion proposal for summer jobs, Chicago flood relief and small-business loans.

Even now, the White House proposal for urban enterprise zones remains tangled in a brier patch of special interests--a 1,200-page, $28-billion tax bill that, among other things, repeals the luxury tax on autos, boats and jewelry and broadens individual retirement accounts for middle-class taxpayers. The bill, which was the last key vehicle for tax measures this year, has passed Congress, but President Bush’s press secretary said Friday that Bush would veto the measure.

Observers say the tortuous path of urban aid reflects fiscal realities and power politics. “The strength of the special interest lobbies that pushed for a variety of new tax breaks vastly outweighs the strength of the cities, the mayors and the residents of the neighborhoods,” said Robert Greenstein, executive director of the liberal-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

The cities also seem to have suffered from the notoriously short attention span of the American public and its elected representatives, as the worst nightmares of escalating violence failed to materialize.

One sign of urban America’s brief shelf life atop the national agenda was the pattern of post-riot television news coverage.

In the month before the outbreak of the riots on April 29, news programs on ABC, NBC and CBS broadcast just three feature stories exploring the problems of urban America, according to a tally by the Center for Media and Public Affairs in Washington. Following the spasms in Los Angeles, coverage expanded dramatically.

In May, the number of stories about inner-city issues rocketed to 37. Then, as public attention started to fade, so did the coverage. The total slipped to 29 stories in June, 12 in July and seven in August. By September, the cycle was complete: Once again, there were just three pieces, according to the media center, which excluded news stories about the L.A. disorder and focused on broader, issue-oriented pieces about urban America.

The pattern is typical for perplexing social problems, said Daniel R. Amundson, research director for the media center. Stories about the homeless, for example, increase in the dangerous winter months and then subside as soon as the weather warms up. “I think it’s the same with urban problems,” he said. “The television camera just goes elsewhere (after a crisis). It doesn’t cover long-term, intractable problems very well.”

The same might be said of the government’s creaky policy-making machinery. The cities’ smoldering troubles have a parallel in the oil shortages of the 1970s, an earlier crisis that triggered apocalyptic warnings, voluminous studies and legislative proposals doomed to obscurity. President Jimmy Carter proposed tough measures to cut dependence on foreign oil--but his national energy plan stumbled straight into “the meat grinder of our political system,” recalled Stuart Eizenstat, Carter’s domestic policy adviser.

A ground-down remnant of the White House plan emerged from Congress more than a year later. “We are not very good as a country in dealing with long-term problems, except when they present themselves as a crisis,” said Eizenstat, now a lawyer in Washington.

Another obstacle faced by today’s urban advocates is that the balance of political power is relocating to leafy suburbs. Between 1980 and 1988, the percentage of voters living in the suburbs jumped from 41% to 48%, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, and many observers expect the trend has continued, establishing suburban dominance of the electorate in 1992 for the first time ever.

Indeed, the very status of the nation’s older cities as centers of modern culture and commerce is being eroded by a range of forces, all of which jeopardize their political influence.

Much of the nation’s job creation and population growth in recent years has been on suburban terrain. New technologies, such as home computers and fax machines, enable a growing number of workers to cut back greatly on time in city offices. Many urban residents say they would pack up and leave the city if they could, surveys show.

“Urban America is facing extreme economic pressure and the loss of political influence,” political commentator William Schneider argued in the Atlantic magazine earlier this year. “The cities feel neglected and with good reason: They are the declining sector of American life.”

Urban residents aren’t the only ones who have troubles, though, and that may be part of their problem. The prolonged economic malaise has spread tremors of insecurity into all kinds of neighborhoods, prompting middle-class workers to worry about their own households in an atmosphere of layoffs and staff reductions. By contrast, the 1960s’ War on Poverty was launched during a record-breaking economic expansion.

“When everybody’s scared, you can’t give special attention to one group or another,” said Sam Popkin, a UC San Diego professor who is advising the presidential campaign of Bill Clinton.

Not that the public agrees on what action is called for. For all the emotion on the subject, it remains unclear just how the federal government should go about the complex business of helping local neighborhoods burdened by economic and social problems. At the same time, a growing number of Americans believe the government should pay more attention to the needs of minorities, some opinion polls suggest.

“The American people are pretty ambivalent,” said John Petrocik, a UCLA political scientist. “They want these problems fixed, but they’re not sure how they want these problems fixed.”

Certainly, the presidential candidates haven’t gone out of their way to identify with the urban poor, an approach consistent with long-held Republican strategies but a departure for the Democrats. Clinton has proposed a $6-billion package of aid to the cities, featuring up to 100 new community development banks. Nevertheless, some contend that Clinton’s campaign has methodically played down minority issues in an effort to lure conservative white voters back into the Democratic fold.

By this view, the very word “urban” conjures up images of impoverished minorities and crime that turn off many white voters whom politicians are loath to offend.

“Neither candidate had an incentive to talk about these things--and as soon as they could put Los Angeles behind them, they did,” said Roger Wilkins, a history professor at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va.

Despite such assessments, some maintain the outlook for the cities isn’t entirely bad. The rioting, for example, was followed by public appeals for new economic opportunity and not merely a law-and-order clampdown by the police. Also, the broader focus on the nation’s economy is consistent with aspirations of the poor, some say, because they will be helped along with everyone else as conditions start to improve.

But not everybody is buying it. Once again, urban America is being wholly ignored by national leaders, worries Wilkins, who is black--and will never forget the image of a young boy hissing, “Burn baby burn” at his car while he awaited a traffic light during the Watts riot. “The race problem isn’t going to go away,” he said. “It just gets bigger and worse.”

As Wilkins sees it, while not everybody lives in the inner city, all of society has a stake in improving the quality of life there: “As you look at Los Angeles and the question of poverty, the question that a leader should ask is, ‘What are we going to do about us? What are we Americans going to do about this problem that affects us all?’ That’s the issue.”