The City as Orphan : Social ills: A RAND Corp. study says the federal government was ‘ineffective and wasteful’ in handling urban problems, and then walked away from them. Focusing on L.A., the think tank’s report urges new vision and involvement.

Declaring that some of the nation’s most serious urban problems have been triggered by federal action or inaction, the influential RAND Corp. on Thursday urged Washington to resume a role it abandoned years ago as guardian of the nation’s cities.

In a report prompted by last spring’s civil unrest, the Santa Monica-based think tank said that in recent decades the federal government has adopted tax, immigration and criminal justice policies that placed vast new financial demands on cities, then walked away when it came time to pay the price that was exacted in human and financial terms.

When they did take action on social ills, the report said, federal policy-makers often sought simplistic solutions that proved “ineffective and wasteful” because they attempted to modify behavior unrealistically and worked against social currents.

“This is most dramatically clear in the case of the changing American family and the controversial area of ‘family values,’ ” the editors wrote in an introduction to the 368-page report.

There “will be no return to the Ozzie and Harriet family, and our policies . . . must deal with the consequences; if youth are going to drink, teach them not to abuse alcohol; if they are going to engage in sex, help them avoid the unintended consequences of disease and pregnancy.”

The report, called “Urban America, Policy Choices for Los Angeles and the Nation,” is a series of 13 essays by some of RAND’s top policy analysts, who spent years conducting research, publishing scholarly articles and engaging in dialogues with foundations and corporations that contracted for their services.

The book, however, was financed by the RAND Corp. and written by staff members who are local residents and wanted to put their expertise to use to better what the introduction called “our city--Los Angeles.”

“This is the first time we’ve really concentrated our efforts across the board of increasing our professional input into the dialogue of the future of Los Angeles,” said David Lyon, the RAND vice president who heads the company’s domestic research division. “With this volume, we hope to stimulate further discussion in the future.”

Collectively, the research articles, heavy with data, encourage the federal government to take up a 1960s-style activism and combine it with a new ‘90s pragmatism.

One analyst proposed the creation of a statewide commission on youth and another recommended that Los Angeles schools hire universities and nonprofit groups to run several inner-city schools in an experimental program.

Analyst Joan Petersilia, in an analysis of get-tough-on-crime policies, argues that the thousands of legislative and institutional attempts to crack down on criminals have failed to significantly lower the crime rate.

In California alone, more than 1,000 laws were passed between 1984 and 1991 that changed felony and misdemeanor statutes, most of them in the name of cracking down on criminals, she points out. Such laws have required the building of new prisons and have vastly increased penal costs but have failed to significantly decrease crime rates.

Today, 2.2% of all Californians over 18 are in jail or prison, or on probation or parole.

At a time when each new prison guard may mean one less teacher and every new jail cell one less gang prevention counselor, Petersilia said, it is important to recognize the limitations of growing incarceration, focus on imprisoning serious repeat offenders and divert more resources to crime prevention.

“Her piece was a sobering finding,” said Lyon. “ ‘Lock-em-up’ just may not have worked. . . . You could send someone to Harvard for the cost of keeping them in prison.”

Meanwhile, according to RAND researchers Robert A. Levine and Barbara R. Williams, anti-poverty programs--even in their apogee--have always been “sardines swimming in the wake of whales.” Federal contributions to urban renewal and community development decreased in real dollars, from $8.3 billion in 1980 to $3.6 billion in 1990. For Los Angeles, such federal dollars decreased from $315 million in 1979 to $156 million in 1992.

RAND’s articles, written before the November elections, support arguments advanced during the campaign by President-elect Bill Clinton, Lyon said.

“Our work wholeheartedly supports his emphasis on job creation,” Lyon said. “There is a complete consistency in what we’ve uncovered in our work and the arguments in his campaign. Whether you’re talking about poverty, child care, street drugs, school attendance--all these issues have a strong linkage to jobs.

“The second thing we would recommend, however, is that many federal policies--starting with immigration--look at the implications of our current policies.”

RAND analyst Georges Vernez pointed out that while immigrants may enhance a nation’s long-term social and economic prospects, their short-term costs are being born inequitably by cities where they locate. In Los Angeles, for example, immigrants pay income taxes that go to Sacramento and Washington, Vernez said, while an inequitable share of their large health and education costs is borne by local jurisdictions.

“To address these issues, federal immigration policy should shift to the federal government a portion of the incremental costs currently being borne by a few states and localities for the services they provide to immigrants,” Vernez wrote.

One of the volume’s analyses provides a grim assessment of the complexities and repercussions that accompany many decisions involving social welfare programs.

Expanding welfare benefits is expensive, notes analyst Julie DaVanzo, but reducing payments to get parents off welfare hurts children. Cracking down on “deadbeat dads” is popular, but enforcing child support statutes is tough when paternity must be proved. Welfare incentives encouraging fathers to stay at home sound nice, but may backfire on children since marital discord, among other things, increases the likelihood of juvenile delinquency.

Two programs proven to ameliorate poverty are family planning and Head Start. Children whose births are planned have been proven to be healthier and require less public assistance through their lives, DaVanzo wrote. Children graduating from Head Start programs are more likely to escape poverty as adults. But, DaVanzo notes, family planning is controversial, and Head Start is expensive.

Many of the researchers argued for slow-but-steady approaches based on reality rather than wishful thinking.

“We recognize that good policy does not flow inevitably from good analysis,” wrote Paul Koegel and Audrey Burnam in a chapter about homelessness. “Because preventive approaches are costly and are slow to produce visible results, it will be hard to generate the political will to confront these serious problems more aggressively.”