Recent Articles The American Prospect - articles by author en How She Got a Job <div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p><font class="nonprinting"></font></p> <p> <font size="+2">M</font>iriam Rodriguez lived the welfare life, 15 empty years of soaps<br /> and snacks and midday walks to nowhere. Every day she changed<br /> the diapers, cleaned the apartment, washed the dishes, cleaned<br /> the apartment again, and every day she knew tomorrow would not<br /> be another day, but the same day. Still, the routine had its charms:<br /> $1,018 a month in cash and food stamps, complete health benefits<br /> for her and her four kids, affordable public housing. She had<br /> grown up with nothing, no money and no plumbing, sharing a single<br /> dingy bedroom with both her parents and all six of her siblings.<br /> Now she had a family's best friend: steady money. And an absurdly<br /> clean apartment. </p> <p> But Rodriguez left that life behind. She now works full-time as<br /> a records clerk for Coopers &amp; Lybrand in downtown Boston,<br /> processing forms, answering phones, entering tax data into computers.<br /> It is her first job since 1981, when she was fired from a textile<br /> factory, after quitting a job as a nurse's aide. So far, it's<br /> working out fine. "Miriam does a great job," says her<br /> supervisor, Ella Orrigo. "We overload her, but she handles<br /> it all." Even Rodriguez is amazed how utterly her life has<br /> changed at age 38. "I never used to think of myself as having<br /> a future," she says. "I figured I'd stay on welfare<br /> the rest of my life. Now I feel like I can do anything."</p> <p> Miriam's makeover sounds like a welfare reform success story,<br /> and in a way it is. But it is more of a job training success story,<br /> the result of eight months she spent with a Boston nonprofit agency<br /> called One With One. For 40 hours a week, the program helps foreign-born<br /> and Puerto Rican women learn English as a second language, teaches<br /> them office skills, drills them in corporate culture, guides them<br /> through two internshipsand sends them into jobs. </p> <p> The program's record is staggering: Last year, all 29 members<br /> of Rodriguez's class, including 18 welfare mothers, found jobs<br /> after graduationfrom Yuliya Babsiyeva of Azerbaijan, an $8.90-an-hour<br /> claims clerk at Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, to Min Zhou of China,<br /> a $9.89-an-hour loan clerk at the Education Resources Institute.<br /> The year before, all 19 One With One graduates got jobs; the year<br /> before that, all 48. And a recent follow-up survey indicated that<br /> most graduates are staying employed, often with modest increases<br /> in pay. </p> <p> With states scrambling to move welfare mothers into work, you<br /> might think intensive training programs like One With One would<br /> be all the rage. Think again. The prevailing attitude of the federal<br /> Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act,<br /> and of most state-level welfare reforms, is "work first."<br /> Despite its roots in the rhetoric of dependency, welfare reform<br /> assumes that anyone on the dole can get and keep a job; it sets<br /> a time limit, then leaves recipients to find their way out of<br /> the welfare culture on their own. The top priority is steering<br /> recipients directly into paid or unpaid jobs, or at least job<br /> search and job placement programs. Training is a much lower priority,<br /> and long-term training is almost out of the question. The programs<br /> are not a quick fix, they are not cheap, and they do not always<br /> work. </p> <hr size="1" /><center><br /><a href="/subscribe/"><img src="/tapads/mini_subscribe.gif" border="0" alt="Subscribe to The American Prospect" /></a> <p></p></center><br /><hr size="1" /><p>It is worth noting that One With One does not accept unmotivated<br /> applicants, and this selectivity helps explain its unusual success.<br /> Still, its record shows that with enough time and money, job training<br /> can bridge the gap between at least some unskilled workers with<br /> "underclass" values and a high-skill economy that demands<br /> "middle-class" values. One With One works precisely<br /> because it accepts the ugly truth that many welfare mothers, unpleasant<br /> as it sounds, are simply not ready for the mainstream workforce.<br /> And the workforce is not ready for them. "These women come<br /> to us with absolutely no idea what a job would require of them,''<br /> says Margaret Van Duyne, the founder and director of One With<br /> One. "They think the workforce is nurses chatting at the<br /> nurses' station on <i>General Hospital</i>. They don't get concepts<br /> like punctuality or reliability or customer service. Why would<br /> anyone want to hire them?" </p> <p> <font size="+2">I</font>t is 8 a.m., and 30 trainees are about to find out whether<br /> anyone would want to hire them. They've faced war, repression,<br /> and famine in their homelands. They've struggled with violent<br /> boyfriends, disabled kids, drugs, depression, day care crises,<br /> and decrepit housing in America. Some of them came to One With<br /> One at second-grade reading levels; several were sexually or physically<br /> abused as children. But all that is secondary today, because today<br /> is the Jobs Fair. Twenty-seven companies are here, and there is<br /> work to be found. </p> <p> The women wear no-nonsense business suits and sensible shoes,<br /> hair up in buns and braids. They remember to smile, stand up straight,<br /> make eye contact, shake hands like they mean it. They use proper<br /> English, no slang, no double negatives. At One With One, professional<br /> behavior is a crucial part of the curriculum, and after six months<br /> of intensive drilling, it begins to come almost naturally. "It's<br /> a hard program, but it's worth it," says 24-year-old Clotilde<br /> Rosario, a third-generation welfare recipient. "It's changed<br /> the way I talk, the way I dress, the way I answer the phone. And<br /> my attitude. Now I know I'm getting off welfare, and my son won't<br /> have to grow up with it." </p> <p> For two hours, the room buzzes with earnest chitchat, as trainees<br /> glide from table to table. Marie Denise Chery, a tiny Haitian<br /> woman living in a homeless shelter, proudly informs American Personnel<br /> that her typing has improved from 30 to 45 words per minute in<br /> just three months. "I'll reach 55 soon,'' she says with a<br /> confident smile. Ana Flamenco, a 32-year-old Salvadoran refugee,<br /> reminds Tufts Health Plan that she was a popular intern there:<br /> "They gave me a party when I left!" Mai Doan, a shy<br /> immigrant from Vietnam, answers the Boston Company's questions<br /> with heartfelt résuméspeak: "I am seeking an<br /> entry-level clerical position which offers increasingly challenging<br /> responsibilities." </p> <p> The trainees do come off a bit, well, trained, but the recruiters<br /> are clearly impressed. Many met these same trainees in November,<br /> before their internships began, and the change is dramatic. "They<br /> were incredibly nervous last time, but now they're so much more<br /> comfortable," says Maryanne Edwards, a recruiter for a department<br /> store chain. Ron Porter hands out applications for American Personnel<br /> with an air of near desperation. "They've got great attitudes,<br /> and they're all well-trained," he says. "I'd like to<br /> hire 20 of them." </p> <p>By now, these women have learned to file and fax, run WordPerfect<br /> and Excel, write business letters and purchasing orders. But more<br /> important, they've learned to adapt to the culture of the workforce:<br /> how to manage their time, work on a team, handle a job interview,<br /> follow directions, even make small talk. "Anyone can teach<br /> people how to type, but that's not enough," Van Duyne says.<br /> The premise is that moving from welfare to work is like immigration,<br /> a disorienting process of shedding lifelong habits and adjusting<br /> to a brave new world. Time can be unimportant to the unemployed.<br /> Not to a boss. Skintight jeans may be appropriate on the streets.<br /> Not in the office. For those of us who work, who grew up seeing<br /> parents work, it is hard to comprehend the depth of this cultural<br /> chasm. "Before the program, I didn't know how to turn a computer<br /> on and off, or how to use a staple remover," Miriam Rodriguez<br /> says. "I didn't even know what that thing was." She<br /> is pointing to a paper clip. <br /></p> <p> <font size="+2">I</font>t would be nice if welfare recipients just needed a little<br /> prodding from the government to find stable work, but here are<br /> the facts: Half of them are high school dropouts. More than half<br /> report a history of domestic abuse, and more than a quarter say<br /> they are depressed. Two-thirds test in the bottom fourth for job<br /> skills. One-third have never held a job. And to restate the obvious,<br /> almost all are single moms, and all are poor. Research by the<br /> Urban Institute concluded that only one-fifth of them can find<br /> jobs on their own, and about one-third need only modest job search<br /> assistance. That means nearly half will need serious help, and<br /> welfare reform is not going to provide it. </p> <p> In Massachusetts, Governor William Weld's welfare aides publicly<br /> boast that their caseload has decreased 44 months in a row, but<br /> they privately expect it to flatline soon. With unemployment low,<br /> just about every welfare recipient with any skills has already<br /> found work. Because Massachusetts has a two-year limit on benefits,<br /> even stricter than the five-year federal limit, the stage is set<br /> for a major crisis come December 1998. "The big question<br /> is what happens after two years are up," says Dolores Lewis,<br /> who used to coordinate education and training for Weld's welfare<br /> department but now focuses on child care. "Obviously, not<br /> everyone is going to be working. . . . Some of them need a lot<br /> of hand-holding." </p> <p> Given these widespread concerns about job readiness, you might<br /> think Congress would want to spend some money to try to move 4<br /> million women into work, and provide child care for their 7.5<br /> million kids. Wrong again. The new welfare law actually cuts federal<br /> spending by $55 billion over the next six years, and allows states<br /> to spend the money however they choose. In fact, as Christopher<br /> Jencks recently pointed out in these pages ["<a href="../32/jencks-c.html" target="_top">The Hidden Paradox<br /> of Welfare Reform</a>," May-June 1997], the new block grant system<br /> gives states strong incentives to spend even less on the poor.<br /> And while critics have focused on the implications for low-income<br /> children, who have lost their entitlement to cash benefits, the<br /> switch to block grants also means federal dollars will no longer<br /> be earmarked for job training. Not surprisingly, many states are<br /> already cutting back on those programs. In Massachusetts, where<br /> job training now accounts for only $10 million of a $1.1 billion<br /> welfare budget, the number of recipients in education and training<br /> programs has dropped more than 20 percent since the state's welfare<br /> overhaul began in November 1995. </p> <p> That is bad news for programs like One With One, which runs up<br /> onetime costs of more than $8,000 per trainee, with the government<br /> paying about one-third of the bill. It's very expensive, and it<br /> would be worse if One With One did not recruit volunteer mentors<br /> who help each trainee with English, parenting, and just about<br /> anything else. Still, when a trainee leaves welfare, gets a job,<br /> starts paying taxes, and requires a smaller housing subsidy, the<br /> government savings can be as high as $15,000 a year. What's more,<br /> her children are much less likely to land in foster care or juvenile<br /> detention. And wasn't welfare reform supposed to have something<br /> to do with breaking cycles of dependency? <br /></p> <p> <font size="+2">V</font>an Duyne, a stern Miss Grundy type who wears librarian<br /> glasses and speaks Total Quality Management jargon, runs One With<br /> One like a factory: Her product is reliable employees, and her<br /> 68 corporate partners are her customers. She makes potential trainees<br /> prove their ambition by requiring them to check out three other<br /> programs, spend several days filling out paperwork, and write<br /> several book reports before they even apply. Her program itself<br /> is a simulated workplace in which punctuality is a given, English<br /> is the only language spoken, and a fifth absence is grounds for<br /> termination. "We get these women out of Fantasyland,"<br /> she says. "We make it clear they need to take responsibility<br /> for their lives now, because their employers won't have time for<br /> their problems." </p> <p> On Miriam Rodriguez's fourth day of training, her 15-year-old<br /> daughter Jessica dropped out of school and ran away with a drug-dealer<br /> boyfriend. Van Duyne was sympathetic but firm: Rodriguez had to<br /> solve her problem immediately so she could concentrate on her<br /> training. So Rodriguez signed a warrant for her daughter's arrest<br /> and then skipped class the next day to ask a judge to place Jessica<br /> in a foster home. Jessica begged for another chance, but Rodriguez<br /> refused to take her back for two months. Jessica has learned her<br /> lesson: She ditched the dealer, returned to school, and is now<br /> almost a surrogate mother for her three younger siblings, stepping<br /> in whenever Mom needs to work. "I had never been tough with<br /> Jessica before, but they showed me how," Rodriguez says.</p> <p> Job training is not a panacea, and several studies have shown<br /> that not every job training program works nearly as well as One<br /> With One. Massachusetts actually had the nation's most intensive<br /> and most acclaimed education and training effort for welfare mothers<br /> under former Governor Michael Dukakis, but subsequent research<br /> suggested that the "ET Choices" program produced only<br /> meager gains in income, which were quickly wiped out by a horrid<br /> recession. More recently, a study by Manpower Development found<br /> that programs focusing primarily on "human capital development"<br /> instead of the immediate job market produced no gains in income.<br /> The fuzzier the connection between learning and earning, the easier<br /> it is for trainees to lose interest. </p> <p> But while the well-known failures have convinced some critics<br /> that long-term training doesn't work, the literature actually<br /> provides a pretty clear picture of what successful programs need<br /> to do: <br /><br /></p><ul><br /><li>Make sure clients are truly committed to training and getting<br /> a job.<br /></li><li>Help them overcome barriers to employment, from abusive boyfriends<br /> to health problems to unruly children.<br /></li><li>Teach "soft" skills like punctuality and time management<br /> as well as "hard" skills like word processing and database<br /> management.<br /></li><li>Link training as closely as possible to the job market.<br /></li></ul><p> As a recent General Accounting Office study found, those "best<br /> practices" create results. Two days after the job fair, Clotilde<br /> Rosario became the first member of this year's class to find a<br /> job, as a $10-an-hour data entry clerk in Harvard University's<br /> gifts office. "I want to go to college someday, to be a nurse<br /> or maybe a pediatrician," she says. "My mother grew<br /> up on welfare, and she raised me on welfare. I want a better life<br /> than that for my little boy." </p> <p> <font size="+2">L</font>ooking at the numbers, her chances might seem good. One<br /> With One recently sent surveys to its 174 graduates from the last<br /> six years; 112 responded, and 110 of them are still employed.<br /> (One was laid off in a bank merger; another quit her job because<br /> of a serious illness.) The median starting salary was $8.35 an<br /> hour; the median current salary was $10. But as encouraging as<br /> those numbers are, here is a more important one: 3.9 percent.<br /> That is the current unemployment rate in Massachusetts. In this<br /> labor market, firms are eager to hire, and even workers with limited<br /> skills have a range of opportunities. </p> <p> So what happens when the business cycle turns? This job glut cannot<br /> last forever, and in the coming years, the flood of welfare recipients<br /> pushed off the rolls is sure to crowd the labor market. The danger<br /> is that as more applicants compete for fewer jobs, wages and living<br /> standards at the bottom end of that market will decline even further.<br /> President Clinton can plead with employers and churches and even<br /> federal agencies to hire welfare recipients, but he cannot erase<br /> supply and demand pressures. And historically, former welfare<br /> recipients have been the first workers laid off during downturns.<br /> "The problem is not just getting a job, which is hard enough,"<br /> says Lewis, the Massachusetts official. "It's keeping a job."</p> <p> Miriam Rodriguez understands this dilemma all too well. She now<br /> makes $8.94 an hour, or $18,000 a year, 50 percent more than she<br /> used to collect in welfare and food stamps. And now she can accept<br /> help from her boyfriend, a hotel housekeeper, without fear of<br /> losing benefits. But because of her higher income, her public<br /> housing rent has jumped $163 a month, and her health benefits<br /> at Coopers &amp; Lybrand are nowhere near as generous as Medicaid.<br /> Most ominously, Massachusetts only guarantees free day care for<br /> one year after a family leaves welfare. (It also provides only<br /> one year of Medicaid for former recipients who remain uninsured.)<br /> Rodriguez is on several waiting lists for subsidized day care<br /> vouchers, but she has no idea how she would be able to afford<br /> child care without help from the government. "In a way, my<br /> life was a lot easier on welfare,'' she says. "But I don't<br /> ever want to go back and be a loser again. I'll work something<br /> out." </p> <p> Of course, programs like One With One have more immediate concerns.<br /> President Clinton, eager to "fix" the welfare law he<br /> signed last August, has requested an extra $3 billion for training<br /> for welfare mothers. But the administration is still wedded to<br /> the work-first model, and the national trend increasingly favors<br /> ten-week or even five-week training programs. In Massachusetts,<br /> recipients with school-age children (one-fifth of the caseload)<br /> have only 60 days to start work or community service before their<br /> benefits are terminated, hardly enough time for anything resembling<br /> long-term training. "We've always recognized that larger<br /> investments in training are needed to make welfare reform work,"<br /> says Health and Human Services spokesman Michael Kharfen. "But<br /> I think it's fair to say the emphasis is on getting a job quickly."</p> <p> Last year, the city of Boston asked Van Duyne to run a three-month<br /> program for harder-to-serve welfare recipientsinstead of the<br /> applicants coming to her, she would have to recruit the applicants.<br /> She decided that three months was not enough time to teach office<br /> skills, so she set up a retail training program, and sent invitations<br /> to the 800 women on her list. Twenty-five replied; ten actually<br /> came. In the end, Van Duyne halted the experiment before classes<br /> even began. "We just couldn't guarantee that these women<br /> could get a job and keep a job after three months," she says.<br /> "I'm sorry, but it would take longer than that just to restore<br /> their self-respect."</p> <p> As a nod to the climate, Van Duyne is cutting next year's program<br /> from eight to six months, but she says that for her troubled clientele,<br /> any shorter would be an invitation to failure. The research of<br /> David Ellwood and Mary Jo Bane revealed that most welfare mothers<br /> at any time are long-term recipients; the work of One With One<br /> suggests they need long-term help. "Miriam Rodriguez was<br /> on welfare for 15 years," Van Duyne says. "Can you get<br /> her a stable job in six weeks? Then tell me how, because I would<br /> like to know." <br /></p> <p> <font size="+2">I</font>n some ways, women like Rodriguez represent the promise<br /> of welfare reform. Even she admits that after 15 years on the<br /> rolls, she probably would have stayed on indefinitely without<br /> a time limit forcing her to seek self-sufficiency. Her daughter<br /> Jessica, who had threatened to get pregnant and go on welfare<br /> herself, now wants to be a hairdresser. The father of three of<br /> Rodriguez's childrenwho could not even live with her under the<br /> old system without endangering her benefitsrecently proposed<br /> marriage, and she accepted. </p> <p> Still, One With One is not exactly proof that anyone can be saved.<br /> Rodriguez and her classmates were obviously ill equipped for the<br /> workforce, but they were also unusually motivated to get equipped.<br /> Compared to the hard core identified by Ellwood and Bane, they<br /> were the elite. Rodriguezthe only one of her seven siblings to<br /> finish high schoolchecked out 14 programs before deciding on<br /> One With One; she read 43 books to prepare for her training. "I<br /> figured if I was going to do this, I was going to do it right,"<br /> she says. "My whole life had been a failure. I wasn't willing<br /> to fail again." </p> <p> This year, 300 people inquired about One With One; only 30 jumped<br /> through the requisite hoops to get accepted. In an era of time<br /> limits, what will happen to the other 270? And what will happen<br /> to those who never even bothered to ask about the program? The<br /> welfare reformers are right: The old system created an entitlement<br /> mentality, and encouraged dysfunctional behaviors. But if graduates<br /> of programs like One With One are immigrants to the world of work,<br /> no one has figured out what to do about families stuck in the<br /> old country.</p> <p><br /><br /><br /><!-- dhandler for print articles --></p></div></div></div> Sat, 17 Nov 2001 00:39:10 +0000 141130 at Michael Grunwald The Myth of the Supermayor <div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p><font class="nonprinting"></font></p> <p> The national media have proclaimed a new conventional wisdom for the city formerly known as Nap Town: this is now the Golden Age of Indianapolis, and Stephen Goldsmith is the mayor with the Midas touch. He may not be as well known as Rudy Giuliani of New York, Richard Riordan of Los Angeles, or even Ed Rendell of Philadelphia, but he has become the official prototype for the New Breed of Urban Mayors, those paragons of pragmatism who are reviving America's cities, rolling up their sleeves and reinventing municipal government.</p> <p><i>Governing</i> magazine paid the ultimate tribute, naming Goldsmith its 1995 Public Official of the Year. But he has also been canonized by columnists ranging from William Raspberry to David Broder to George Will, by magazines including <i>Time</i>, <i>Newsweek</i>, <i>Forbes</i>, and the <i>New Republic</i>, by newspapers like the <i>New York Times</i>, the <i>Wall Street Journal</i>, the <i>Washington Post</i>, and even the <i>Jerusalem Post</i> and <i>Asahi Shimbun</i> of Tokyo. Most of the accolades have been aimed at his innovative efforts to privatize government services, but he is now attracting more general praise for his modestly titled how-to book, <i><a href="" target="_amazon">The Twenty-First Century City: Resurrecting Urban America</a></i>.<br /></p> <p> Meanwhile, Indianapolis is piling up headlines like "Diamond in the Rust" and "Star of the Snowbelt." It was ranked the second-best city for living and working by <i>Employment Weekly</i>, fifth-best for small business by <i>Entrepreneur</i>, seventh-most-improved for all business by <i>Fortune</i>. <i>Nation's Cities Weekly</i> crowed that "Indianapolis has evolved into a growth dynamo, setting new standards of excellence for urban renewal and economic development." The <i>Christian Science Monitor</i> agreed: "This Corn Belt capital is emerging from Midwest anonymity into a vibrant, marquee metropolis."<br /></p> <p> Amid all the furor over Indianapolis as Paradise City and Goldsmith as Mayor God, it may be surprising to hear the city's truancy court supervisor describe how her caseload has almost quadrupled during the Goldsmith era. "People don't realize how bad things are out there," she says. "The drugs, the abuse, the dysfunctional families. It's awful, and it's getting worse."<br /></p> <p> It may be even more surprising that the supervisor is Margaret Goldsmith, the mayor's wife. But if any of the national reporters who made their obligatory pilgrimages here to gush about this Republican mayor and his visionary, businesslike approach to government had taken even a cursory look around, they might have noticed the dark side of "Trendy Indy." At a time when crime rates are plunging nationwide, the city has shattered its all-time homicide record three times in four years. At a time when education is finally the top national priority, only 21 percent of sophomores in the Indianapolis public schools (IPS) passed a test of basic math and English skills last fall.<br /></p> <p> "Oh, we've got plenty of problems," one city official says. "The murder rate is absolutely intolerable. The schools are awful. . . . People just don't want to live around here if they've got kids, and it's hard to blame them."<br /></p> <p> That city official? Mayor Goldsmith himself.<br /></p> <p> That's not all he has to say about his city. On a recent drive through some not-so-trendy sections of Indy, the mayor also mentioned that half of its neighborhoods are "falling apart,'' that his housing authority is "totally incompetent,'' that teen pregnancy here is "an epidemic," that taxes in Indianapolis are "much too high," that crack cocaine is "out of control," and that police corruption is "a serious problem." At one point, he stopped to point out a boarded-up supermarket. "This," he said with a sweep of his hand, "was our grandest failure." He had spent $3 million to lure the store to a dangerous ghetto, only to see it fail because he didn't take additional measures to make the ghetto less dangerous. "It was a dumb idea," he concedes now. Then he pauses. "You know, this is the first time in a while that I haven't heard gunshots around here."<br /></p> <hr size="1" /><center><br /><a href="/subscribe/"><img src="/tapads/mini_subscribe.gif" border="0" alt="Subscribe to The American Prospect" /></a> <p></p></center><br /><hr size="1" /><p> Goldsmith's golden-boy national reputation infuriates plenty of local critics: liberals who consider him a downtown mayor, teachers who resent his advocacy of school choice, Republicans who call him a traitor, Democrats who have dubbed him "ambition in a suit,'' and activists who blame him for all the urban woes of Indianapolis. But the point here is not that Goldsmith is a bad mayor. Yes, he can be brusque and sarcastic. Yes, he probably talks too much. Yes, he's an ambitious smarty-pants; the guy was America's youngest Eagle Scout at age 12. As a manager, though, he has been creative and often courageous, reforming his city's budget and revitalizing his city's infrastructure. The urban woes of Indianapolis are not entirely his fault.<br /></p> <p> An outbreak of media groupthink spread the myth of the supermayors: reform-minded Republicans like Goldsmith, Giuliani, and Riordan as well as tough-minded Democrats like Rendell, John Norquist of Milwaukee, Dennis Archer of Detroit, Richard Daley of Chicago, and Michael White of Cleveland. President Clinton and GOP congressional leaders kept the myth alive, glad for an excuse to ignore the deep structural problems that still imperil most cities. But Goldsmith's struggles in Indianapolis should explode the myth. After all, he's supposed to be the model supermayor, a boy-faced wunderkind who is chairman of the Manhattan Institute's Center for Civic Innovation; a good-government guru who has given tutorials to scores of visiting politicians; the man whom Newt Gingrich called "the most creative and innovative leader in the country." And Indianapolis is supposed to be the model reborn city. "It shows there's only so much mayors can do," says analyst John Neal of the Polis Center, an Indianapolis think tank. "They look like miracle workers when the economy is great. They look like idiots when the economy goes bad. But a lot of what's happening in urban America is out of their control."<br /></p> <p> The supermayors make a nice counterintuitive story after so many years of drumbeating about urban decay. They're smart. They prefer action to ideology, pragmatism to partisanship. They even call each other to talk about union negotiations, wastewater treatment, and anti-graffiti sealants. But none of the favorable articles ask the obvious questions: If American cities are enjoying such a renaissance, why are their child poverty, incarceration, and teen pregnancy rates at all-time highs? If Goldsmith can resurrect urban America, why can't he provide safe streets or decent schools in Indianapolis?<br /></p> <p></p><hr noshade="noshade" size="2" /><h3>INDIANAPOLIS ILLUSIONS</h3> <p> Indianapolis is America's twelfth most populous city, anchoring America's thirty-first most populous metropolitan area. If that sounds like a discrepancy, well, it is. Indianapolis statistics are distorted by Unigov, a 1969 annexation deal in which Indianapolis quadrupled in size to include all of Marion County, swallowing 12 of its inner-ring suburbs. Unigov, brokered by then Mayor Richard Lugar, has been renowned ever since as a groundbreaking example of metropolitan government in action, "a national poster child for progressive reform." In fact, however, it's more of a numbers game. Understanding that numbers game goes a long way toward explaining the myth of Indianapolis, as well as the cult of Goldsmith.<br /></p> <p> Metropolitan government is an attractive concept for people who care about cities, and it has been justly praised in these pages [see Karen Paget's "<a href="../36/paget-k.html" target="_top">Can Cities Escape Political Isolation?</a>" January-February 1998]. It can help unify a region. It can connect the overflowing wealth of the suburbs to the desperate needs of the city. It can create efficiencies in government through economies of scale. It can encourage local politicians to take a regional approach to issues like transportation, environmental protection, and economic development. So why didn't this happen under Unigov?<br /></p> <p> The problem is that Unigov was never a real metropolitan government. The dozen suburban communities that agreed to join the enlarged entity known as Indianapolis all insisted on maintaining control of their own schools, fire departments, police departments, and poor relief. They also levy property taxes on their own residents to pay for those functions, forcing the original city (where a whopping one-third of the property is tax-exempt) to do the same. Four of those suburbs -- Southport, Beech Grove, Lawrence, and Speedway (the home of the Indianapolis 500) -- even retained their own mayors; they essentially "opted out" of Unigov, yet they are still represented on its council and still vote for its mayor. In other words, the suburbs have been tied to the city politically, but except for a small countywide downtown-improvement tax, they have not been tied to the city economically. Today, for example, taxes for poor relief are ten times higher in Center Township, as the original city is known, than in any other area of Indianapolis -- its residents have the greatest need for relief, and, consequently, the least ability to supply it.<br /></p> <p> So what <i>has</i> Unigov accomplished? For one thing, by including upscale suburban voters in city elections, it has assured 30 years of white Republican rule in Indianapolis, even though the original city limits are now predominantly Democratic and almost half minority. But the most important legacy of Unigov is its assurance that when middle-class city dwellers escape to the suburbs, they still count as Indianapolis residents. The result is an array of impressive numbers for the entire "city" (a population that has almost doubled since 1950, low crime rates, above-average public school test scores, 2.5 percent unemployment) that mask serious deterioration within the original city limits (a population that has dropped by half since 1950, soaring crime rates, abysmal test scores, census tracts with double-digit unemployment). The overall strength of Marion County has made Goldsmith a media darling, but his duties are mostly limited to the struggling original city. In effect he gets the best of one world and the worst of another: he gets credit for success he had little to do with, but has had little real success in the place where he's charged with achieving it.<br /></p> <p> "The out-of-town press sees the Indianapolis numbers and goes wild," says Harrison Ullmann, a veteran <i>Indianapolis Star</i> reporter who is now editor of the alternative weekly <i>NUVO</i>. "But under the shadow of Unigov, we've got all the same problems in the urban areas as everyone else. Believe me, when the bottom drops out of this economy, this city could really go to hell."<br /></p> <p> In fairness, Unigov has probably contributed somewhat to a revival of downtown Indianapolis, although the booming national economy has been a far more important force. (After all, downtowns are enjoying similar comebacks in Philadelphia, Chicago, Cleveland, and even Detroit without any Unigov-style arrangements.) A new $320 million Circle Center Mall is drawing high-end shoppers back from the suburbs. Convention attendance has jumped 700 percent since 1984. The so-called Mile Square area has a new retrochic ballpark and a new IMAX theater; construction is underway on a $175 million Pacers arena and a $50 million NCAA headquarters. Downtown Indianapolis still feels a bit like Zenith, the boring, boosterish midwestern city in <i>Babbitt</i>, but at least it's no longer safe for the local Jaycees to shoot pigeons in Mile Square on Sunday afternoons.<br /></p> <p> Mile Square, however, is only one square mile; it just happens to be the one square mile where national reporters stay on their expense accounts before they file stories about the Indianapolis Renaissance. Unfortunately, the city covers 403 square miles, and many of the square miles around downtown are not the kind of areas that attract IMAX theaters. Still, this bad news, like the good news about Mile Square, has much more to do with larger economic forces than with Mayor Goldsmith.<br /></p> <p> As early as 1849, when railroads were giving the city a reputation as the Crossroads of America, the <i>Indianapolis Journal </i>knew it would never flourish as a mere transportation hub: "If Indianapolis ever arrives to be anything more than a respectable inland town, it must be by becoming a manufacturing city.'' That is exactly what happened. The auto industry took off here early in the century -- symbolized by the city's main claim to fame, the speedway, which was built in 1909 -- and Indianapolis steadily developed a diverse manufacturing base. By World War II, it was known as the "Toolmaker to the Nation."<br /></p> <p> Indianapolis is still called the Crossroads of America, thanks to a busy airport, bustling cargo hubs, and the nation's most interstate highways, but it is no longer known as America's toolmaker -- or anything-else-maker. In 1960, 41 percent of the city's jobs were in manufacturing; by 1990, the figure was 18 percent. The top three Indianapolis employers are now the city, state, and federal governments, which together provide ten times more jobs than the largest private employer, the pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly &amp; Co.<br /></p> <p> Of course, the decline of manufacturing was not just an Indianapolis phenomenon; it was an American phenomenon, as dozens of cities built around factories lost their economic engines and fell apart [see Kim Phillips-Fein, "<a href="phillips-k.html" target="_top">The Still-Industrial City</a>"]. It's an oft-told story: jobs, money, and political clout fled to the suburbs. Massive highway projects, urban renewal projects, and public housing projects destroyed vibrant neighborhoods. Racist federal housing policies and bank redlining accelerated white flight and inner-city blight. Crime, squalor, and lousy schools scared away anyone with the money to leave, which led to more crime, worse squalor, and even lousier schools. The only difference in Indianapolis is that, thanks to Unigov, when the moneyed classes fled for the suburbs, they officially stayed in the city. In fact, in elegant suburban Washington Township -- just inside the border separating Indianapolis from Carmel, one of America's richest towns -- sits the home of the mayor of Indianapolis, pleasantly isolated from the city he cannot save.<br /></p> <p></p><hr noshade="noshade" size="2" /><h3>(STILL) BROKEN WINDOWS</h3> <p> When he became mayor in 1991, Goldsmith figured that if there was any problem he could dent, it was crime. He had 12 years of experience as the prosecutor for Marion County, and he had a plan: Indianapolis would become the national model for community policing. As a criminal justice fellow at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government, Goldsmith had occupied the office next door to community policing expert George Kelling, and he had become a true believer. So in his first week in office -- after two arson investigators were shot and killed by gangbangers in a Center Township housing project -- he called the city's police captains into a meeting.<br /></p> <p> "I told them I wanted to implement community policing faster than any other city in America," he recalls. "I knew how to do it. I was determined to do it. And they just said . . . no." No? "I mean, they nodded their heads and said they'd get right on it, but they just didn't want to do it. And they made it perfectly clear there was no way I could make them do it.''<br /></p> <p> So much for the supermayor. Goldsmith and his police brass have banged away at the reactive culture of the Indianapolis Police Department (IPD) ever since. They tried cracking down on quality-of-life crimes like public drunkenness and speeding, the "Broken Windows" strategy devised by Kelling and James Q. Wilson. They tried copying New York City's vaunted crime-mapping program and Boston's model gun-tracing program. They expanded bike patrols, foot patrols, canine patrols. They moved officers from desks to streets. They launched a seemingly endless array of community policing initiatives: IMPACT. Safe Streets. Directed Patrols. SCAT. The Violent Offenders Program. Project Saturation. Graffiti Busters. Zero Tolerance. Metro Homicide Reponse Teams.<br /></p> <p> Despite all their efforts, violent crime has skyrocketed. The immediate cause of the chaos comes down to two words: crack cocaine. It is a smokable neighborhood wrecking ball, too powerful and too lucrative to control. There were only 41 murders on IPD turf in 1989. But out-of-town gangs brought crack here in 1992, and an epidemic of crack-related killings soon followed, breaking city records in 1994, 1996, and 1997, when there were 121 murders in IPD territory. Major cities like New York, Los Angeles, Washington, and Boston experienced the same phenomenon, but several years earlier; midsized cities like Nashville, Louisville, and Milwaukee are experiencing it now.<br /></p> <p> The good news is that in the major cities, murder rates subsided once crack use burned itself out, and that seems to be happening in Indianapolis. In early 1992, one-fourth of arrested criminals here tested positive for cocaine. That leapt to one-half by late 1994. Now it is back down to one-fourth, and gangs are turning to less potent merchandise like heroin and crank. "We expect the murder rate to start dropping soon," Goldsmith says, and then grins. "It might not be entirely attributable to the brilliance of the mayor.''<br /></p> <p> The nationwide correlation between crack and violence is a reminder that law enforcement is not the only factor in reducing crime, a point that mayors and police chiefs tend to forget when it suits them. Still, everyone agrees that good police work has helped in some cities, especially New York and Boston, and the IPD in the Goldsmith era has not covered itself in glory. IPD Chief Michael Zunk says the force was totally unprepared for crack, and it still seems ill equipped. For example, Latin gangs just entered the local drug wars, and the IPD does not have one Spanish-speaking homicide detective. Meanwhile, the FBI is investigating allegations of rampant corruption on the force; one officer was charged with murdering a dealer to protect his own drug ring, and Zunk has been announcing new indictments and suspensions almost weekly.<br /></p> <p> Goldsmith, who ran for governor and lost in 1996, points out that the state, not the city, is responsible for the overloaded courts, overcrowded jails, and underfunded drug treatment programs in Indianapolis. It's true that the real roots of urban crime reach deeper than most mayors can dig on their own with limited time and limited resources. It has become unfashionable to say, because it sounds like a squishy excuse for misbehavior, but crime and drug abuse are endemic in poor areas with high rates of single motherhood and low rates of education. This has been starkest in black ghettos; in Indianapolis, blacks are now one-fourth of the population and three-fourths of the murder suspects.<br /></p> <p> "Come here," Margaret Goldsmith tells me, "You need to see this.'' She pulls out a crime-scene photo of a sparsely furnished living room that has been ransacked and set on fire. A popular local minister lies facedown on the floor with his hands tied behind his back. A large hatchet is embedded in his head, right where a 15-year-old boy left it. "Tell me, is that my husband's fault?'' she demands. "Come on, I'd like to know. What should Steve Goldsmith have done to prevent this?''<br /></p> <p></p><hr noshade="noshade" size="2" /><h3>EXECRABLE EDUCATION</h3> <p> In his book, Goldsmith tells a nice success story about crime, recounting how police runs to a housing project called Clearstream Gardens dropped 74 percent after a dedicated cop took the beat. I saw Clearstream in March, and I can report that crime in the project is now down to zero. It's vacant.<br /></p> <p> A few days before I visited, though, a horrible crime did take place in the elementary school next door to the project: a seven-year-old boy pointed a .25 caliber handgun at his friend and pulled the trigger. Fortunately, the gun jammed. Not surprisingly, the gunslinger had stolen the weapon from his gangster older brother after his mother had left him home alone. "This is what we're up against," says Sally McMahan, a social worker at the school. "The social problems in the schools reflect the social problems in the city."<br /></p> <p> The Indianapolis public schools, like most center-city school districts, are a shameful mess. IPS spends $9,000 per pupil, yet 82 percent of their sixth graders still fail basic skills tests. In the Speedway schools, only 28 percent fail; the overall rate for Indianapolis is 50 percent. This is why the Goldsmiths, like most rational Indianapolis families with money, send their four kids to private schools and suburban-township public schools. "There's no way in hell I'd send my kids to IPS," Margaret Goldsmith says. Can you blame her? The basic-skills scores in Washington Township are more than three times higher than in IPS.<br /></p> <p> As for the mayor, he has basically given up on IPS. Oh, he tried to fix it; in fact, he takes a kind of perverse pride in his failed attempts. He failed to persuade the board to cut costs. He failed to persuade the teachers union to relax its work rules. Supposedly the paragon of a popular conservative mayor, he was even unable to generate enough support for those old conservative standbys, vouchers and for-profit schools. Even his small victories -- getting two new candidates elected to the school board on a reform slate, persuading the board to select his choice for superintendent, persuading the state legislature to give superintendents more power to hold schools accountable for poor performance -- have yielded few real results. This year, the board got rid of his handpicked superintendent. Yet Goldsmith didn't even bother to endorse anyone in this year's school board races.<br /></p> <p> Today, his only ongoing work to improve education in Indianapolis is as chairman of a committee for the local archdiocese, raising money for Catholic schools. After a series of public forums where parents screamed at him for IPS-bashing, he doesn't even bother to criticize the system anymore. Now he hosts media events spotlighting "IPS success stories," like the Stephen Foster Collins Elementary School, where a whopping 48 percent of the students actually pass basic tests.<br /></p> <p> "I don't mind tilting at windmills, but I like to win every now and then," he says. "It's funny: the best thing for my career is to be Polyannish. The more I agitate for change at IPS, the more I get blamed for the problems."<br /></p> <p> It will be interesting to watch what happens in Chicago, where Mayor Daley seized control of the schools, and in Philadelphia, where Mayor Rendell persuaded the board to hire a take-no-prisoners superintendent to shake up a dysfunctional system, but few mayors, no matter how super, wield much power over education.<br /></p> <p> Urban schools are a brutal challenge, for many of the same social reasons that safe streets are a brutal challenge. It's hard for children to learn when they're homeless, when their mothers smoke crack, when their mothers' boyfriends beat them, when their second-grade classmates try to shoot them. A recent study found that more than 20 percent of IPS students have lead poisoning, and more than 20 percent have asthma. Three-fourths are poor enough for subsidized lunches, and more than half live with a single parent. McMahan, the social worker, says 90 percent of her students know someone who was killed. These are not the kind of social problems that get fixed cheaply, or overnight. "This is a terrible atmosphere for learning," says Shirley Sheeks, who has taught first grade at the school next to Clearstream Gardens for 27 years. "I used to be able to control 36 kids, no problem; now I can't control 20. They won't stay on task; they constantly hit each other. They just get no supervision whatsoever at home. I ask them what they talk about at the dinner table, and they look at me like I'm crazy."<br /></p> <p> The cult of Goldsmith ignores these problems, or at least implies that Goldsmith was working some of his mayoral magic on them. Alas, no -- the magic is in the Unigov numbers: the suburban school systems raise Indianapolis's overall test scores.<br /></p> <p> The problem with cities in 1998 is that so many of their independent and productive residents are gone, and their dependent and destructive residents have nowhere else to go. (Buzz Bissinger plays up this theme in <i><a href="" target="_amazon">Prayer for the City</a></i>, his depressing tale of Rendell's heroic -- and doomed -- efforts to save Philadelphia.) The problem for mayors in 1998 is that the factors that drove away the middle class -- economic shifts, rising crime, crack cocaine, decaying schools, skyrocketing taxes -- are so often beyond their control.<br /></p> <p> Yes, even taxes; they're a case study in mayoral impotence<b>. </b>When Goldsmith took office, a nearby suburb was advertising on a billboard in northwest Indianapolis: "Buy a New Home in Anderson. Save Thousands in Taxes." From 1983 to 1991, Indianapolis property taxes had increased 25 percent, and income taxes had tripled. So as a good Republican mayor, he has flatly refused to raise taxes. He has even cut the property tax rate a bit.<br /></p> <p> Yet taxes are even higher now than when he took office. That is because the city, thanks to the fragmented Unigov structure, is not the only taxing authority in Indianapolis; there are dozens, and few share Goldsmith's interest in tax relief. The biggest taxer, incidentally, is the school board, which has raised its rate an additional 33 percent since 1990.<br /></p> <p></p><hr noshade="noshade" size="2" /><h3>WHAT A MAYOR CAN DO</h3> <p> Goldsmith may have failed to cut taxes, fix schools, and reduce crime, but there is good news, too, and not just downtown. The gritty neighborhood of Haughville is slowly coming back; as neighborhood leader Olgen Williams says, you can tell by all the prostitutes walking the streets. "I know it sounds crazy, but when people were getting killed here all the time, no john would ever come to Haughville," he says. "I'm not saying hookers are a good thing, but it proves we've made this place a lot safer."<br /></p> <p> If the overall troubles of Indianapolis suggest what mayors can't do, the mini-revival in Haughville may suggest what they can do. Goldsmith visited the neighborhood after his election to propose a sweat-equity program, offering infrastructure dollars if residents would add their labor. Williams, the director of a local social services agency, stood up and said: No. Haughville had been shafted too often by City Hall, and there was no way he was going to put his neighbors to work until Goldsmith proved he was serious. "Face up to your responsibilities, and then we will respond," he said.<br /></p> <p> Since then, Goldsmith and Haughville have forged a true partnership. They worked together to attract four small manufacturing companies to an abandoned rail switchyard. A new health clinic opened in April, on a site chosen by the community and purchased by the city. Police and community leaders have met constantly to set up crime watches and relieve tensions; homicides have dropped by half. A feisty 67-year-old named Ermil Thompson has spent seven years transforming an abandoned building she says was selected by God into a community center for local kids; the city has provided furniture, computers, and grants. The Front Porch Alliance, a clergy-led coalition put together by Goldsmith, has become a dominant presence in Haughville. It is fitting that the alliance's leader in Haughville is an ex-addict named Reverend Roosevelt Sanders, the son of a rabble-rousing activist who battled City Hall until his death. "My father did what he thought was best, but we've found that working together works," says Sanders, who runs job training and drug treatment programs at his father's old church.<br /></p> <p> "Empowerment" is a cliché, but activists all over Indianapolis say the same thing: they don't need a supermayor, just a partner, someone who will listen, someone whose actions persuade residents that getting involved is no longer a waste of time. And during Goldsmith's tenure, the number of community groups in Indianapolis has doubled; touchy-feely as it sounds, that may be his most lasting achievement. Police solve more crimes when residents will tell them what's going on. Kids learn more when their parents get involved in their schools. Neighborhoods improve when people stop sitting around and do something about them. "A lot of us used to sit around the barber shop all day and complain," says Williams, whose latest idea is to launch an antilitter campaign in Haughville. "The mayor helped us get up and build the maturity we needed to get things done ourselves. Because he can't do it, you know. We gotta do it."<br /></p> <p> But no matter who does it, it can't be done without money. Goldsmith claims his savings from privatization have helped him to pour an extra $800 million over seven years into neighborhood infrastructure -- restoring sidewalks, parks, sewers, and trust. The Indianapolis-based Lilly Endowment Inc., America's richest philanthropic fund as of the end of 1997, has contributed money as well. Nonetheless, it is not surprising that the two most expensive items in the Haughville revival have been funded by federal programs. HOPE VI, America's largest urban renewal effort since the 1960s, provided $30 million in U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development funds to raze Concord Village -- the hellhole housing project where the arson investigators were killed in 1992 -- and replace it with attractive single-family townhouses. The Weed and Seed initiative out of the U.S. Department of Justice has pumped in another $500,000 a year for a neighborhood-wide community policing effort.<br /></p> <p> Overall, though, federal aid to cities plunged from $44.2 billion to $23.4 billion per year during the Reagan and Bush years, and Clinton has not restored the cuts. This may explain some of Goldsmith's problems, but he can hardly use it as an excuse. Back in 1993, Goldsmith testified before Congress on a U.S. Conference of Mayors proposal for a multibillion-dollar Marshall Plan for cities, an economic stimulus package for urban areas like the one that helped resurrect bombed-out Western Europe after World War II. Goldsmith promptly ditched the conference's talking points. We don't need more federal money, he told the committee. We need less onerous federal regulations. Relax the rules -- environmental laws, prevailing wage laws, even the Americans with Disabilities Act -- and we can get by with even less money. His testimony was a throwback to postwar Indianapolis, when the city stagnated into Nap Town under the control of a Babbitt-style Chamber of Commerce that equated federal assistance with communism. Conservatives on the committee, needless to say, were delighted.<br /></p> <p> Goldsmith believes cities have relied too heavily on a tin cup strategy, begging the federal government for handouts while ignoring their core problems. Maybe he's right. But he cannot argue with a straight face that he could not use more money. The IPD has fewer officers today than it had in 1968. The IPS can afford summer school for fewer than one-fourth of its students who need it. Indianapolis has hundreds of abandoned homes that need to be demolished and almost as many polluted industrial sites that need to be cleaned up. There is a desperate lack of treatment programs for addicts. There are virtually no parenting programs for teenage mothers. And Margaret Goldsmith's truancy court is so understaffed that she can only hear the most egregious cases; most chronic absentees face no consequences whatsoever. More money, by itself, won't fix anything. But more money is necessary to establish the basis of the virtuous cycles -- community policing, micro-banks, and so forth -- that will allow Indianapolis residents to reclaim their city.<br /></p> <p> This may be the least fashionable idea for our time: that federal largesse could actually help turn around troubled cities. But for decades, the federal government has subsidized the explosive growth of suburban America: through generous FHA loans, mortgage interest deductions, and sprawl-inducing highway projects, to name a few measures. </p> <table align="center"><tr><td><b>The danger is that Goldsmith's illusory success will lend credibility to the socially damaging practice of fiscal neglect.</b></td> </tr></table><p>In a post-cold war era of huge surpluses, the federal government should be helping subsidize the resurrection of urban America. Perhaps this could have been achieved through metropolitan government, using suburban dollars to attack urban problems, but Unigov has simply allowed suburban voters to control urban dollars: it's representation without taxation. The danger is that the illusory success of Mayor Goldsmith will lend political credibility to the socially damaging practice of fiscal neglect.<br /></p> <p> In fact, that's just what Clinton and the Republicans have tried to do with the Myth of the Supermayor. As it says right on <i>The Twenty-First Century City</i>'s book jacket, "America's decaying urban areas are being held responsible for solving their own problems." The reality, though, is that Indianapolis has failed to solve its problems, and the same is true in other cities run by supermayors. Violent crime is still escalating in Norquist's Milwaukee. Unemployment in Giuliani's New York is still twice the national average. More residents have fled Rendell's Philadelphia than any other American city since he took office. Vast expanses of Archer's Detroit still look like they've been carpetbombed. Without restored federal aid, broader political coalitions, or genuine metropolitan governance, a mayor can only do so much. Just ask the ultimate supermayor. "A mayor can make a difference, but the expectations of what we can achieve are just ludicrous," Goldsmith says. "Oh well. We ask for it, right?"</p> <p></p> <p><br /><br /><!-- dhandler for print articles --></p></div></div></div> Thu, 15 Nov 2001 00:49:21 +0000 140980 at Michael Grunwald