When a city is badly broken, it can be very tough to fix.
Just ask Darren Green, president of a coalition of community groups in Trenton, N.J., where deep budget cuts in 2011 forced the city to lay off a third of its police force.
“We’re at a place now where it’s very dangerous to walk the streets,” he said, his thoughts periodically interrupted by the distant sound of passing sirens. “The school system is dysfunctional and not working. You have young people who are robbing elders. Young people who are destroying communities. With no leadership and the community in disarray, there’s a lot of bad here.”
The disarray and mayhem in Trenton is extreme. In August the city set a record for the most homicides in its 221-year history – at least 32 people killed this year — in this city of 85,000. Trenton’s mayor, Tony Mack, has asked the state for emergency funding. But his appeal has been undermined by allegations of corruption after a federal grand jury indicted him in December 2012 on bribery charges. Several key members of his administration also have been charged with other, unrelated crimes.
The plight of the Garden’s State‘s capital city is by no means typical of American cities in 2013. For the most part these regional economic hubs held up relatively well after the Great Recession tore one of the biggest holes in local revenues since the Great Depression.
Some, like San Francisco and Boston, blessed with vibrant high-tech industries churning out high-skill, high-wage jobs, all but escaped the downturn. These high-growth local economies have recouped the ground lost to the recession and continue to help push the national recovery forward. Others, like Orlando and Phoenix, which were hard-hit by the housing bust, have pulled themselves up by the bootstraps. They are turning their economies around by building centers of excellence in growth industries like biotech and alternative energy.
Forward-thinking mayors, such as Chattanooga, Tenn.’s, Andy Berke, have made their cities magnets for foreign investment by investing in leading-edge technology like high-speed gig networks. That has helped recast the southern city, formerly known for Moon Pies, as a model hub for the smart grid. Now it is one of the fastest-growing cities in America.
That’s good news. The strength of the U.S. economy is based on our cities that house 80 percent of the nation’s population and drive more than 90 percent of GDP, according to the U.S. Conference of Mayors and HIS Global. The clout of these metros is a whopping $13 trillion, or nearly one-quarter of the economic output of the 200 largest countries combined.
That’s because America has a broader base of large cities than any other developed country in the world. These mega metros are also an integral part of the global marketplace driving export activity and innovation. McKinsey Global Institute, in its “Urban America: U.S. Cities in the Global Economy”report, estimates that more than 10 percent of global GDP growth will come from these local economies over the next 12 years.
Mounting fiscal challenges
Today U.S. cities face different prospects for short-term recovery and long-term growth, and each needs to tailor a strategy based on its inherent strengths and weaknesses.
Federal funding cutbacks, combined with the economic damage from the Great Recession, continue to challenge Main Street. Eight cities have filed for bankruptcy since 2010, including Detroit; Scranton, Pa.; and Stockton, Calif. That’s not surprising, considering that all but four of the 384 local economies tracked by Moody’s Analytics’ Business Cycle Index had fallen into recession by 2009. Of those, 255 moved into recovery in 2010.
That gradual improvement continues today. But there are laggards. For example, Decatur, Ill.; Michigan City, Ind.; and Utica, N.Y. have economies that are still retracting.
Credit to The Blaze
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