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Evaluating the Success of Urban Success Stories

Arresting and reversing the condition of urban distress in America's cities represents one of the most challenging and perplexing problems confronting policy-makers. Indeed, urban distress in American cities has proved to be a stubborn and largely intractable phenomenon during the past two decades. Nevertheless, a number of cities that were experiencing distress at the beginning of the 1980s are now being acclaimed as 'urban success stories' or 'revitalised' cities. We evaluate the performance, between 1980 and 1990, of these supposedly 'revitalised' cities on objective indicators of the economic well-being of their residents and compare their performance to that other cities that were equally distressed in 1980. We conclude that with the exception of Atlanta, Baltimore and Boston, the purportedly 'revitalised' cities performed no better with respect to change in the economic well-being of their residents than did other cities that were equally distressed in 1980—and in many cases performed worse.