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Urban Policy in the Time of Obama: Introduction to the Symposium

INTRODUCTION This is a remarkable moment for urban policy in the United States — or at least it should be. The country is still recovering from a housing crisis that has wrought extensive damage to both already struggling urban centers (such as Newark, Detroit, Cleveland, and Baltimore) and Sun Belt boomtowns (such as Las Vegas, San Diego, and Miami). The crisis of black unemployment, underemployment, and criminalization has also grown dramatically worse in the Great Recession, and local governments have struggled with the worst fiscal problems they have had since the “fiscal crisis” of the mid-1970s. Added to this context is the biography of the president. He is a political and intellectual product of New York, Boston, and, most importantly, Chicago, where he famously worked as a community organizer. As such, he is the first “urban” president the country has had for many decades. All this would point to a period of significant and very public discussions and policies about urban policy. To some extent, this has been the case. In February 2009, shortly after taking office, the Obama administration created the first ever White House Office of Urban Affairs to “take a coordinated and comprehensive approach to developing and implementing an effective strategy concerning urban America.”1 Also, several urban policies have been launched, including, but not limited to: Strong Cities, Strong Communities; Promise Neighborhoods; Choice Neighborhoods; and Immigration Action Roundtables. And yet, despite these initiatives, there is remarkably little substantive discussion of urban issues in American policy circles or, more generally, its public sphere. This lack of discussion is mirrored and magnified by the fact that these initiatives are all fairly small, modestly funded, and low profile. To some extent this is to be expected since the country officially gave up on “the urban crisis” 40 years ago. Since then, the country has only become more suburbanized and divorced from urban life, and much of the policy discussion has consciously and explicitly chosen to focus on the “regional” or the “metropolitan.” But the relative absence of “the urban” from public discussions is notable given the aforementioned contexts. Also, most public policies are not, in theory, specifically spatial, place-based or urban in nature. This has long been the case in federal policy. And yet, policies regarding education, immigration, labor, and many others are “urban” in the sense of having significant impacts on urban areas and urbanization processes. Accordingly, several articles here examine the ways in which a set of nominally aspatial policies in the Obama administration have been impacting American cities and are therefore “urban policies” even if they are not normally thought of as such. This Journal of Urban Affairs symposium is the result of a set of panels I organized with Amy Khare of the University of Chicago at the Urban Affairs Association’s annual conference in April 2013. The beginning of President Obama’s second term seemed an opportune moment to analyze and investigate the state of American urban policy.