Understanding Central City Hardship

Abstract

There is a danger that the current, and justifiable, preoccupation with New York City finances by observers of the urban scene will cause them to overgeneralize. New York's fiscal ills have been chronicled in depth and classified in full. But New York's problems are not those of every city. For urban policy makers, the cardinal fact about United States cities is that they are different. The analysis in this article is part of an ongoing examination of the problems and conditions of local governments in the nation's largest metropolitan areas. We have focused here on central cities. Our primary interest is in two characteristics of these governments: (X) the seriousness of the social and economic problems which they face, and (2) the extent of what might be called their political isolation as indicated by the population size of central cities in relation to the population of the metropolitan area of which they are a part. Such analysis is important as an indication of both the extent of, and need for, fiscal and political arrangements for burden spreading in metropolitan areas. If a particular central city is nearly as well or better off than its suburbs, techniques to spread burdens within that metropolitan area will be less essential than in cases where the central city faces significant economic and social hardship relative to its suburbs and where it accounts for a relatiVely small proportion of the total population of its metropolitan area. The latter cases are the ones we need to look at most closely in seeking relief measures for central cities.