I must again in candor say to you members of this The 1992 Los Angeles Riots and the It is the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Kerner Report. We can reflect, again, on the same moving picture--now the April, 1992 riots in south central Los Angeles after the verdicts in the trial of the police officers accused of beating motorist Rodney King. After the Los Angeles rioting, Congress enacted and the President signed a $1.3B aid package that included small business loans for Los Angeles and a $500M program to create summer jobs for youth nationwide. This was accompanied by talk in Congress and the White House of a longer run plan. Central to the plan were urban enterprise zones and "weed and seed" initiatives. The enterprise zones were to provide tax breaks and regulatory relief to businesses and corporations if they located in blighted areas, like south central Los Angeles. "Weed and seed" programs were to use tough law enforcement to get dealers and drugs out of targeted neighborhoods and then to provide educational and employment opportunities plus related services to the people in those places. Congress passed this so called long run package in October, 1992. The day after the 1992 election, the President vetoed the bill. So ended the federal response to the riot, at least for the 102nd Congress. The contents of the vetoed bill and the motivations of Congress and the White House over the spring, summer and fall of 1992 raised grave doubts about whether the gridlocked American federal political process would or could ever enact informed solutions to the problems of the inner cities and the persons who live in them. Enterprise Zones and Weed and Seed The long term bill reflected an emerging consensus within both parties in Congress that enterprise zones were key to reform. This view was more than shared by the White House. It was the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), after all, who had originally and tenaciously pressed for the zones from the beginning of the Administration. Yet almost all evaluations of the many enterprise zones that have been tried to date at the state and local levels showed them to fail, especially in employing sufficient numbers of high risk young people in the devastated areas -- like members of the Crips and Bloods, the south central Los Angeles gangs. The evaluations were done by such respected institutions as the U.S. General Accounting Office and the Urban Institute in Washington, D.C. Their conclusions were echoed in warnings by such conservative and business-oriented publications as the Economist and Business Week that enterprise zones, alone, and in the form proposed in 1992, were not the answer. There appeared to be little recognition by Congressional Democrats, Congressional Republicans and the White House that, based on existing evidence of what works in the inner city, enterprise zones could only become one part, eventually, of a long run solution. Members of Congress in both parties and the Executive Branch for the most part appeared to take little note of the fact that "weed and seed" was mostly "weed." The initiative was heavy on law enforcement -- something that, indeed, appeared necessary to help stabilize neighborhoods for economic development. But the "seed" part of the initiative was barren. There were almost no new funds. Just reallocations from existing programs. The "seed" plan was never thought out, and never came close to integrating all the "multiple solutions" that inner city evaluations since the Kerner Commission had indicated were necessary. The Byzantine Ways of Congress Because the Congress and the White House saw enterprise zones as the legislative centerpiece, and because such zones involve tax breaks to businesses, the urban legislation became incorporated into a much larger package of tax changes. The tax bill cost $27B over five years, only $7B of which was targeted on cities. The bill also repealed the luxury tax on furs and yachts, granted corporations automatic tax writeoffs for purchases of intangible assets like lists of potential customers, subsidized retirement savings for high-income families, and provided many other benefits for the advantaged. To people outside the Washington, D.C. Beltway, this might have appeared as just another example of the outmoded procedures and rules of Congress. Not only were most of the tax breaks included in the package irrelevant to the inner city, but they deprived the federal government of revenues to fund devastated neighborhoods. By choosing enterprise zones as the key solution, Congress needed to process the legislation primarily through committees that dealt with taxation, revenues and finance. Because encrusted Congressional rules say little about keeping focused -- here on the inner city -- it was easy for all of the other provisions, irrelevant to the city, to be added. This meant that the many contributors to the package had many motivations other than what to do in the wake of the Los Angeles riots. For example, one Congressional player wanted to help shipbuilder constituents. Another was concerned about wealthy constituents who were saving for retirement. There appeared to be little reflection in Congress that, based on inner city programs that already had seemed to work best-like, as we shall see, Head Start, Job Corps and non-profit community development corporations -- other committees should have had the lead much more - especially those committees with expertise in human resources, education, employment and economic development. No New Taxes? Why did the President veto the bill? Because enterprise zones were an unworthy centerpiece? No, the President was enthusiastic about them. Because of the deficiencies of "weed and seed?" No, the President said the opposite -- the bill fell short on his weed and seed proposals. Because the bill failed to include programs that had worked? No - the veto message said nothing about that. Rather, the President vetoed the bill primarily because it included some tax increases. *The President never again wanted to violate his pledge of "no new taxes." In the election campaign, he defined an extraordinary range of revenue measures as "tax increases," and some of those measures were in the $27B tax bill. The bill therefore was not politically viable, given the way the President had backed himself into a corner with his definitions. This was so even though the bill included tax decreases that offset tax increases. Critics also claimed that the President followed a double standard, because he did sign an energy bill with tax increases in it. So the President vetoed the wrong bill for the wrong reasons, leaving the people of south central Los Angeles and other inner cities with nothing more than the original $1.3B emergency aid -- which was called a "quick fix" by advocates for the cities and the poor. Alice in Wonderland All Over Again It all was Dr. Clark's Alice in Wonderland written large, Yogi Berra's "deja vu all over again." Congress and the White House misunderstood the problem. They then constructed a solution that flew in the face of what really did work. The status quo gridlock was guaranteed even more because Byzantine Congressional procedures packaged the misperceived solution as part of a plan of tax changes, some of which heightened the President's political fear of tax increases. The question was not seriously raised of whether or not, from a substantive and economic point of view, tax increases on the rich might logically have been part of the financing, after years of favored federal government treatment of the well off and the deepening crisis of the inner city. Keeping the Kerner Prophesy Alive and Well Over the last twelve years, the pursuit of folly became the conventional wisdom. As a result of trickle down economics, the rich got richer and the poor got poorer. During the 1980s, children living in poverty nationwide increased twenty-two percent and average hourly wages fell by more than nine percent. In the shadow of some of the most sophisticated medical centers anywhere, infants in Washington and Detroit had higher rates of mortality than in Cuba and Bulgaria. The number of prison cells doubled while housing for the poor was cut by eighty percent. One of four African American males was in prison, on probation or on parole at any one time. The ratio was one to three in California, which usually leads the rest of the nation. Yet violent crime increased by thirty five percent. America had the highest rates of incarceration in the industrialized world -- but also the highest rates of violent crime. The "war on drugs" became a domestic Vietnam. The English spoken by inner city African Americans became more and more different from the English spoken by whites. Overall, in spite of some gains since the 1960s but especially because of the federal disinvestments of the 1980s, we conclude that the famous prophesy of the Kerner Commission, of two societies, one black, one white -- separate and unequal -- is more relevant today than in 1968, and more complex, with the emergence of multiracial disparities and growing income segregation. The Goal of This Report The goal of this twenty-fifth anniversary report is to suggest a policy that works. It is not our intention to provide detailed comparisons between recommendations in the voluminous Kerner report and policy today. Instead, we will concentrate on new policy for the rest of the twentieth century that is in keeping with the principles of the Kerner Commission and the spirit of the new Administration in Washington. Our focus is on the hard core poor in the cities, the roughly ten percent of the population who live in urban areas of concentrated long-term poverty, and whose violence and suffering has a disproportionate effect on American life, class tension and race tension. We Know of Much That Works Those with vision need not despair about the experiment in democracy that Alexis de Tocqueville described so eloquently in Democracy in America in 1835. The fact is that we already know quite a bit about which investments work in the American inner city. They are cheaper and more productive, economically and in terms of human capital, than trickle down economics, prison building and drug interdiction. Based on scientific evaluations over the last two decades, the policies that work can be summarized as investing in people -- especially children and youth -- and using those investments as much as possible for reconstructing our cities, as part of what now have become new national economic priorities. Investing in Children Head Start is not perfect. But it has been evaluated as perhaps the most cost-effective, across-the-board inner-city prevention strategy ever developed. Yet, today, whereas more than fifty percent of the nation's higher income families ($35,000 and above) enroll their three-yearolds in preschool, the enrollment rate is only seventeen percent for lower income families. It is noteworthy, if frustrating, that the Kerner Commission called for "building on the successes of Head Start" more than twenty-five years ago. It is time to extend Head Start to all eligible children, even though it is clear from programs like Project Beethoven in Chicago public housing that preschool needs to be complemented by multiple youth, employment, economic and community policing innovations in the most deteriorated neighborhoods. Investing in Youth Over the last twenty years, despite pessimistic rhetoric that "nothing works," and in the face of twelve years of federal government disinvestment, many community-based, non-profit ventures have shown encouraging successes in tackling the problems of violence and drug abuse among urban youth. Illustrations include the Argus Community in the Bronx, Centro Sister Isolina Ferre in Puerto Rico, Delancey Street in San Francisco and Project Redirection nationwide. Many of them have been judged successful in careful scientific evaluations. Most have "bubbled up" from the grassroots, thus providing "ownership" for the disadvantaged. Often, they have evolved because the more traditional service delivery mechanisms for the youth of the inner city--including the schools--have failed. When we look at the successes for high risk youth in the inner city that have built up a reasonable amount of scientific evaluation, as well as the initiatives that seem on the right track but need more rigorous evaluation, several lessons seem clear: There is value in organizing and implementing non-profit Multiple solutions are needed for multiple problems--the Solutions need to be flexible and staff need to be caring Sound management must be put in place. A way must be found to secure at least minimal resources |