What about the cities?
WHEN BIG CITY bosses chose presidential candidates, cities enjoyed a privileged place on the national agenda. In 1968, the Democratic platform bragged about past urban achievements and promised future aid for mass transit and housing. The Republican platform was even more urban, promising "a vigorous effort, nation-wide, to transform the blighted areas of cities into centers of opportunity and progress, culture and talent." Richard Nixon offered interventions with a free market twist, including housing vouchers, simplified building codes and pro-city tax incentives.
Our cities are as important today as they were in 1968, but you wouldn't know it from the first caucus and primary, held in states without big cities. The economy is powered by the idea-rich clusters around New York and San Francisco, not the black soil of Iowa. Yet, Republicans now ignore cities altogether, and Democratic urban policies cater too much to well-organized urban interests. We need national politicians to pay more attention to urban problems, and this will only happen when we start judging them on their urban policies.
The Republican silence on urban issues is particularly sad because Rudy Giuliani is one of America's most distinguished former mayors. Mayor Giuliani was once a strong voice against guns and for immigrants, but candidate Giuliani, like Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney, toes the Republican line on those issues. That line does not favor cities. While a right to riflery may make sense in rural Iowa, an abundance of guns only harms our inner cities. While residents of small town America may dislike immigrants, immigrants are the lifeblood of dynamic urban areas. The one hopeful sign for cities in the GOP race is that Giuliani and Romney support educational reforms, especially school choice.
The leading Democrats offer distinct approaches to urban policy. Barack Obama is the urban insider, with passion and first-hand knowledge but also the insider's curse of being too close to entrenched urban interests. John Edwards may be fighting for the rural, populist mantle of William Jennings Bryan, but his antipoverty policies could help inner cities if his economic populism doesn't destroy urban entrepreneurship first. Hillary Clinton's pragmatic centrism will do the least to fight urban poverty, but her focus on education and innovation may well be the best thing for cities in the long run.
Obama's urban policies display creativity and insight. His reverse commuting program tries to address the spatial mismatch between suburban jobs and the urban poor. His program for released inmates represents a belated attempt to mitigate the human costs of making cities safer by incarcerating millions.
But Obama, the urban insider, also favors throwing cash at the federal agencies strewn throughout our cities. He seems enamored of the building projects, beloved by community organizers, that make little sense in much of urban America. Building may be helpful in high priced areas like Boston, but it is foolish to subsidize construction in places with abundant private sector building, like Texas, or in declining areas that already have more houses than jobs. Obama also flirts with the great curse of urban advocacy: putting places ahead of people. I would like to hear him say more about encouraging people to leave less productive areas and less about revitalizing places that cannot reverse their decline.
Edwards, the rural redistributionist, favors massive antipoverty spending that would benefit the urban poor without inducing them to stay in poor cities. Like Nixon, Edwards prefers housing vouchers and that makes sense. Unfortunately, Edwards's hostility to private entrepreneurship courts disaster for America and its cities. He has recently distinguished himself by favoring a punitive attack on subprime lending that would make it near impossible for the less fortunate to borrow in the future. Targeting the entrepreneurs who employ or lend to the poor does more harm than good.
Clinton's policies lack Edwards's poverty focus and Obama's urban insight, but her support for education recognizes its role as our best weapon against urban poverty. There is much to admire in her universal pre-kindergarten plan and her mentoring program for at-risk youths. She also has an "innovation agenda" that might benefit the cities that are the seedbeds for most American innovation.
The Democrats have barely sketched urban policies, and the Republicans have done less, but candidates' statements ultimately reflect voters' interests. If we are going to get a better urban policy, then we must ask the candidates to say more about cities and then judge them on what they say.
Edward L. Glaeser, a professor of economics at Harvard University, is director of the Rappaport Institute For Greater Boston. 