THE URBAN ENVIRONMENT

A decade after scholars zeroed in on a mainly black urban underclass, supposedly the creation of flawed welfare policies and impervious to antipoverty efforts, some key indicators of inner-city trouble have quietly turned around. Black teenage births, infant mortality, violent crime and school dropout rates are down significantly. In poor neighborhoods once given up on, from the South Bronx to East Oakland, a social revival of sorts is evident.

No one can say for sure what accounts for these changes. But one likely factor is a decade-old push to replace fragmented poverty programs with a “community building” approach. Across the country, public and private initiatives are emphasizing relationships--linking young people with adult mentors, giving pregnant women peer support, focusing on fathers, not just mothers and children--and seeing this approach pay off in better school performance, improved infant and child health and less urban violence.

As President Bill Clinton moves to make welfare reform a reality in his second term, these community-building efforts offer lessons to build on. Unfortunately, the new welfare law pivots on an underclass analysis, which holds that only dramatic welfare cuts and work requirements can improve inner-city life. This premise now seems dated.

Community building emerged from the underclass debate and is no less concerned about persistent urban poverty. Like underclass theorists, community builders believe that social isolation aggravates poverty by depriving the poor of the network of relationships and institutions--church groups, ethnic and immigrant associations, extended families, small businesses--that helped earlier generations of low-income Americans move into the mainstream. Accordingly, community-building initiatives seek to strengthen such relationships and institutions, especially those that promote self- help and social support, rather than simply providing services to needy individuals.

There’s evidence this approach is beginning to pay off:

* In Savannah, Ga., business, government and community leaders experimented with public funds in the city’s poorest neighborhoods to develop strategies that let low-income neighbors help one another. Young mothers were paired with older women mentors, while parents who faced losing their children to foster care were matched with experienced peers, who gave support and advice. In the last few years, black infant mortality has dropped 45%, foster-care placements declined 25% and teen pregnancy fallen 12%; serious juvenile violence decreased, too.

* In Baltimore, city agencies, nonprofit groups, churches and residents have teamed up to transform the Sandtown-Winchester neighborhood. More than 100 outreach advocates go door to door getting pregnant women to prenatal care, their children into preschool and unemployed fathers into jobs, when possible. In three years, the neighborhood’s violent crime and infant mortality rates are down an estimated 20%, school attendance is up and almost 800 residents have found jobs, a significant impact in a neighborhood of 10,000.

* In the South Bronx, community development corporations (CDCs) have built 22,000 housing units in a neighborhood once synonymous with urban blight. Now five CDCs have joined together to build community, not just housing, by providing child care, health clinics, men’s groups, Little League teams and a new employment service that does everything from resume writing to conflict resolution to get residents mainstream jobs.

* In Oakland, black infant mortality is down 50%, thanks to a web of social supports to keep pregnant women healthy and away from drugs. Now, public-agency leaders partner with nonprofit groups to create self-help and social support networks and to promote self-sufficiency in high-poverty neighborhoods.

Nationwide, researchers have counted more than 50 community-building initiatives. In Southern California, the fledgling Los Angeles Urban Funders project is testing community-building strategies in three neighborhoods. But there’s no way to count the thousands of health and welfare administrators, black ministers, funders, YMCA directors, business leaders and community activists whose work has been transformed by the new approach. It’s still an art, not a science. But research supports its key insight: Relationships are key to turning lives around.

Mentoring programs that link at-risk youth with caring adults--Big Brothers/Big Sisters, for example--have helped young people avoid drugs and pregnancy and complete school. Low-income pregnant women, studies show, have healthier babies if a network of friends and professionals support their efforts to eat well, get medical care and avoid drugs and alcohol. One project has shown that welfare recipients make an easier transition to work if they get help understanding work culture, managing child-care conflicts and finding another job if they lose the first, as most do.

These results have enormous implications for Clinton’s welfare goals. Welfare policy based on the underclass analysis cut benefits and pushes mothers into the crowded low-wage labor market, believing that the short-term suffering of welfare families will pay off in the long-term reduction of urban poverty. By contrast, welfare reform driven by the logic of community building can capitalize on the demonstrable changes in inner-city neighborhoods.

Future programs should draw on the experiences of the networks of self-help and social support that community-building initiatives have created and develop pathways to employment for welfare mothers. Some cities, facing labor shortages, will welcome these new workers. In others, community-building projects have had more success employing residents themselves. That means job creation must be a component of any welfare-reform strategy, but it’s conspicuously absent from federal efforts.

A focus on community building could ensure that new jobs programs, where needed, aren’t make-work nonsense, which neither build community nor teach work skills. Job-creation strategies might first target the child-care and family-support needs of women entering the labor market.

Welfare reform anchored in community building could complete the renewal of inner-city neighborhoods that is just underway. But welfare cuts that drive poor mothers into the low-wage job market, leaving their children without adequate care, will swamp these islands of urban renewal in a tidal wave of misery.