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The FUTURE ONCE HAPPENED HERE

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This is a story - a classic tragedy, if you will. The rise of the big cities. The fall of the big cities. And finally, the promise of their redemption. Fred Siegel's book identifies the source of urban America's decline: their enthusiastic embrace of Sixties Liberalism, not only in personal behavior but as public policy. In 1965, America was in the midst of a midlife crisis. Strong and self-rghteous for so long, the country began to entangle itself in self-doubt. The origins could be tracked to the original Civil Rights Movement which rightfully forced middle-class America to confront their own hypocricy and prejudice. The aims of the original Civil Rights leaders was not to overthrow American society. Rather, it was to demand that we enforce our Constitutional laws and stop mocking the principles in the Declaration of the Independence. Men like Dr. King understood the promise and beauty of America. The last thing they wanted to do was undermine it. But five days after President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Los Angeles erupted in a race riot. Large sections of Watts were burned to the ground and dozens were killed. In 1967 and 1968, deadly race riots broke out in Washington, Cleveland, Detroit, and other urban centers. Middle class families who lived in the city couldn't understand what was happening. Many of them fled to the suburbs; the so-called "white flight." But most of them stayed - at least initially. At the end of the 1960s, the question that urban leaders faced, writes Siegel, was "how do we deal with the twin problems of race and poverty?" One option was to stick with the past solution of cultural assimilation and private sector advancement. But that wasn't good enough anymore. Instead, a combination of intellectuals, minority activists, big-spending pols, and "compassionate" voters took a large and unprecedented gamble. The millions of black families that had crowded into northern cities since World War II would be the guinea pigs in a great liberal experiment. Blacks and other racial minorities would no longer be encouraged to assimilate into American society. Afterall, the middle-class lifestyle was "sick" and "guilty." In a complete reversal of Dr. King's dream, blacks would be expected to create their own norms, values, and institutions. While this may seem to be a perverse triumph of individualism, it was a unique form; it would be what Siegel labels "dependent individualism." In other words, while city residents would be expected to unshackle themselves of moral restraints, they would also do it at taxpayer expense. Poverty, the liberal activists charged, was a problem of money - people didn't have enough of it. It some cases that was true. But in other cases it wasn't true. Unfortunately, welfare payments came to subsidize a whole dysfunctional subculture. In the 1970s and 1980s, the "riot ideology" impregnated a large majority of city voters. Even though the large cities were in an inexplicable decline, government leaders insisted that the road to Utopia could be reached with even more liberal policies: ever larger "social programs" including job training, public housing, and drug treatment. And even looser moral standards including drug users and prostitutes crowding city parks and aggressive panhandlers harassing city streets. In 1992, after the trillion-dollar "War on Poverty" and a crass civil culture that had dismissed every moral restraint as a need for therapy, Los Angeles erupted into violence again. Siegel says that these riots, which were even deadlier than the Watts upheaval of 1965, fundamentally discredited urban liberalism. After reading his book, the only question the reader can ask is: "What took so long?" In the late 1990s, mayors like Rudy Giuliani of New York and Richard Riordan in Los Angeles have cut crime and the size of the Welfare State. They've proven to be very popular and successful. But resistance to their policies remain, especially in the intellectual class. In recent years, the cities have experienced an "Indian summer." Whether this climate will mature into a "new spring" is far from certain. An engaged citizenry, alerted to the historical mistakes of liberalism but still enchanted by its romanticism, hold the key to our future.

This book is written well enough that one might overlook the numerous flaws in Mr. Siegel's case. This case, while sometimes compelling, is far too often flawed. Simplistic logic seems to be Mr. Siegel's forte - that is, he takes things as cause and effect without offering proof of any assocation. He argues, for instance, that Cuomo's building of prisons lowered the crime rate and Reagan's deregulation led to economic growth. Proof behind either statement is lacking, as it is throughout this book. For a history, this was also majorly flawed in that it did not identify sources - where does Mr. Siegel get the few statistics he puts in the book? Demonizing conservatives and liberals also seems to be Mr. Siegel's strong suit, as this avoids the need to offer a comprehensive ideology of his own. I did learn more about all three cities from this book but cannot be sure how much is definitively true due to the large amounts of spin. Worth reading, but do so critically.

This book is excellent dissection of the failure of American urban policy since the 1960s, but it does have some flaws of note. Fred Siegel has a clear point to make, but all too frequently he gets waylaid by his own grudges. It is obvious that this man is a Democrat in the conservative mold furious at the disastrous manner in which Liberals in the late 1960s and 1970s ran three of America's finest cities. Fine. 1960's Liberalism was a disaster for Americas cities, particularly New York, Washington & Los Angeles. Point taken and agreed upon, but time and again this point is made in an angry and confrontational manner.

Siegel's publisher would have done good to convince his author to adopt a more conciliatory tone. This book is angry, and the author's anger perhaps serves a dual purpose- to showcase how angry moderate, suburban Democrats (such as this reviewer) are at how urban liberals led the party astray, and to mirror the anger and contempt these liberals felt towards their critics.

Good message. Uneven delivery.

Fred Siegel very effectively portrays the political forces that have combined to effectively destroy our central cities. Siegel characterizes post Wagner New York as being controlled by a "new Tammany Hall" driven largely by unchallenged municipal employee unions and social service provider lobbies. The result is a "leaky bucket" economy that leaves little for recipients of social services or for residents. While he does not use the "new Tammany Hall" label for his other two subjects --- Washington, DC and Los Angeles --- the net result in those two cities is similar. All three central cities --- and most other larger American central cities --- are becoming much poorer in relation to their suburbs, continue to lose middle income residents to the suburbs and face even more uncertain futures.

The conventional wisdom has been to blame the decline of the cities on external factors, especially a perception that the US federal government has failed to provide sufficient financial resources. But Siegel disputes this view, showing that federal funding has not declined, it has only not risen as fast as burgeoning city budgets. Siegel shows that central city decline is, first of all, the result of conscious city-level policies that have "back-fired."

For those inclined to believe that the central cities must be restored to their former importance, such as through densifying "new urbanist" policies, "The Future Once Happened Here" will be very disappointing. Siegel shows that the cities have been abandoned by middle income people because they have failed in their fundamental duty of security (crime prevention), failed to educate children effectively, failed to provide quality public services and failed to maintain a competitive tax structure. Siegel's work supports the thesis that the fundamental problem of the cities is not revenues, it is spending --- how else could such public policy failure be achieved at so great a cost? Residents are free to leave, and many do. Siegel notes that a large percentage of residents in each city plan to leave. Ben Bissenger's recent book on Philadelphia ("A Prayer for the City") chronicles the decision making process of one dedicated urbanite family that tried more than once to live in the central city, but was driven out by crime. It is a less difficult decision for people and families who have no particular passion for the city. As a result, the cities are increasingly populated by those with low income, and those with high enough income to opt out of reliance on city services, through expensive private schools and high security apartment buildings. But there are even worse examples than the New York, Washington and Los Angeles examples that Siegel relies upon. In less than 50 years, St. Louis has managed to drive away 60 percent of its population. More people have moved out of Detroit and Chicago combined than live in metropolitan Portland (Oregon). Cleveland --- the current darling of the urban revitalization cheerleaders --- has dropped below 500,000, a humbling development for a city that neared one million at its peak. The list goes on and on.

While Siegel ends his book on an optimistic note, there is, at best, faint cause for optimism. Urban revitalization is now largely limited to superimposing publicly subsidized infrastructure, such as convention centers, domed stadia, entertainment facilities and light rail lines on organism with some vitality at the center (downtown) surrounded by tire shaped devastation. It will be sad indeed if the ultimate revitalization of the cities is to convert their downtowns into the equivalent of regional amusement parks.

Fred Siegel brings a fresh and innovative perspective to a problem that is much more fundamental than is usually admitted --- the effective demise of US central cities.

Wendell Cox (wcox@publicpurpose.com)
Former Member, Los Angeles County Transportation Commission
Wendell Cox Consultancy
Belleville, Illinois US

Mr Siegel has done an excellent job of presenting a synposis of the recent economic, social and political history of NYC, LA and DC. Very readable and enlightening. I find his viewpoint pertinent, particularly in view of today's political events. He captures the liberal hole digging of "social justice" in these cities and presents arguements, mostly for NYC, on how they can refill them. Mr Siegel maintains, for the most part, a historian's view of the three cities and uses other major cities, such as Detroit, to augment his discussion. Mr Siegel has definite opinions on how social welfare and political machinery have created a fatal mixture in these cities, a situation applicable to most of the major cities of the US. The only disappointment in this wonderful book is that after highlighting the troubles in all three cities, he focused his concluding chapters exclusively on NYC. I would rather have read his thoughts on all the featured cities in keeping with the theme of the book. Mr Siegel's book stays on my shelf for future reading and reference!

There is really not a lot that is contentious about the central argument in THE FUTURE ONCE HAPPENED HERE. The book looks at the fate of three once great American cities - New York, Los Angeles and Washington DC, and argues that their demise over the last few decades is a direct result of the following: After the urban riots of the 1960's the ruling liberal urban elites convinced themselves that this anger was justified by the poverty of urban blacks. To ameliorate this situation they decided to create a vast social welfare system. This, Mr Siegel calls the "riot idelogy" and it is characterized by the replacement of a belief in personal responsibility with a philosophy of life that instills dependence on government.

Another reviewer rightly says that this concept of riot ideology is reminiscent of Edward Banfield and his cultural basis for urban behavior as argued in THE UNHEAVENLY CITY; I think the argument here is less focused on culture but more simply on discipline in economics and morals. It is certainly more plausible that what was offered by Banfield. The riot idelogy has caused an explosion in urban crime and a huge increase in government expenses, and concomitantly an increase in taxes; all of which have driven private industry out of the city and contributed to fiscal chaos.

This argument is not originally Mr Siegels', nor is it new; it however remains controversial. William Julius Wilson in THE TRULY DISADVANTAGED, years ago similarly argued that the liberal creators of the Great Society programs were wrong headed for believing that simply providing welfare programs would cause poverty to shrink; reduction of poverty is influenced much more by economic growth. Both authors in stressing the role of the economy have been heavily criticized by the left. Neither book however is partisan and Mr Siegel certainly is critical of conservative politicians, who with their anti-urban bias, use the inner city poor as whipping boys for the cultural forces that so scare suburban and rural voters.

While Mr Siegel is lucid and certainly vocal in ascribing blame, if there is a weakness in the book, it is with solutions. In contrast to THE TRULY DISADVANTAGED, Mr Siegel is rather silent on what to do about the inner city poor. Certainly fiscal and moral discipline, economic growth, and private sector initiatives are fine but that is broad based. At the individual level it still comes down to people. Hopefully Mr Siegel's silence here does not mean that in the end he supports the view that all that the poor need to do is change their culture and get a job. After all is said and done, the dire situation that the inner city poor still find themselves in requires government assistance; the debate is really about what forms and level this should be.

I am a traditional and yet often disillusioned Democrat. That is, I am a proud member of the party of FDR, Truman, JFK and LBJ but am often disillusioned by the 'new left' and its often out of touch agenda. I am more of a traditional New Deal Democrat. That is, socially I am more moderately conservative(though occasionally moderately liberal)while being a staunch social welfare liberal(within the context of personal responsibility). As the reader may tell, my ideology is confusing. The feeling of being confused was explicitly outlined well in this book, which tells of the faults of liberalism from a proud New Democrat.

I have always yearned for a national agenda to take back our cities from the explosion of destitution, violence and moral and physical poverty which has plagued them. Siegal's book allows us to have a great framework in which to begin.

Siegal identifies one huge roadblock to progress in urban America: the habbit to, in the words of Moynihan, 'define deviancy down.' Morals and values have turned loss in many cities.

Yet, the author must not forget the morals and values turned loose by the powers that be. That is, corporate America most assuredly has not treated urban centers well, neither has our federal government(whose real funding to urban america has declined by 50% over the past 20 years).

What do we need? We need a new agenda of corporate responsibility, public and social investment and private sector compassion and responsibility. Businesses must be given incentives to once again invest in our cities. Government must invest through health care, nutrition, education and, most of all, a WPA-like job training and employment infrastructure program. There is no better remedy to what hurts some than work. Yet, as Siegal points out as a New Democrat, there is more than simple 'business and taxes' involved here. A sense of responsibility must arise from our urban centers. Thus, the author is correct in attacking racial antagonizers and some liberals(though surely not all)for wrecking New York. Yet, I sense he is too ready to distance himself from liberalism. That is, he overly bashes it while not giving conservatism the lumps it needs. That is all too typical of New Democrats, for all of their many positives.

In many ways, Siegal commits an error when he excessively tries to distance himself from liberalism. For all of his bashing of Sharpton (more than justified - what a demagogue and race baiter!)and Cuomo(not too justified - a great man and a great Governor), he has little bashing of Reagan("welfare queens"), Goldwater, Gingrich and the gang. That is wrong. The right wing's inaction on poverty has only worsened the problem while, surely, the left's over action in some areas(such as political correctnss and moral relativism)has hurt badly, too. Both sides deserve a rebuke.

I would have liked to see a moral center arise explicitly from this work. That is, I would have liked for the author to state the following: "We need public activism in favor of our cities which encourages responsibility and empowers individuals. This may cost alot - just look at the WPA efforts during the New Deal - but in the end it will be worth it. Along with that, we need private sector activism(to often be encouraged by the public)from churches, communities and families. We need values from our government and families." Thus, let's bring in BOTH the government and private sector on a large and caring scale. Let's let(within constitutional frameworks)the government empower the churches and charities to aid urban America, while giving citizens job opportunities where there are none. This is responsible government, not big government. Irresponsible government is what happened under both Mayor John Lindsay and Ronald Reagan, where basic needs were ignored due to ideology and greed.

This book is a great read, regardless of its occasional faults(as I see them, of course). Its agenda is moral in its scope. It has a great starting ground for a new debate on our cities. This is a great book for anyone to read - liberal, moderate or conservative. All ideologies can learn something about responsibility and morals.

An excellent history coverage, Fred Siegel's The Future Once Happened Here examines three major U.S. cities which are metaphors for American social life. From urban problems and solutions to historical trends which have changed the face of these cities, New York, Washington D.C. and Los Angeles are treated to expert analysis.

Two and a half stars is the rating. The polite course would be to round-up to 3 stars instead of rounding down to 2, but that's asking too much here. Even on the issues where I agree with Siegel (affirmative action, racial racketeering and what he labels the "riot ideology") his parochial, don't-hassle-me-with-the-big-picture approach blinds him to the most profound implication of his strongest argument. Reading Siegel's vehement critiques of the riot ideology reminded me of the old saw that you should be careful what you wish for (or wish against) because it might come true. If we remove the ideological blinders, step back, and look at the forest instead of the trees, it becomes clear that the riot ideology is the most diabolically conservative ideology ever conceived. Why? Because it crowds out and preempts any hope for trans-racial populism in this country. From the standpoint of the white elite, it's much cheaper to establish some minority set-asides or funnel some economic development money into the ghetto via self-appointed black "leaders" than it is to establish a single-payer health insurance system or impose a social tariff on Third World imports to preserve the living standards of all Americans. Doubtless these last two proposals would horrify Siegel, which proves my point. Another "benefit" of the riot ideology is that it generates exactly the sort of polarized politics without which the Republican Party would shrivel and die. (Curious readers should look at chapter 3 of a book called THE NEXT AMERICAN NATION by Michael Lind which explores a similar theme.)

In the book's better passages, Siegel does a good job exposing the fatal flaws of the many characters in this saga - the limousine liberalism of John Lindsay and Tom Bradley, the Machiavellianism of Koch, the fecklessness of Dinkins, the corruption/incompetence of Marion Barry, the charlatanism of Al Sharpton, the gangsterism of Sonny Carson. Siegel has these people pegged and they're brought out in interesting vignettes.

But by focusing obsessively on the internal politics of these three cities, Siegel is stacking the deck as that's the only way his blame-everything-on-the-liberals stance could pass the giggle test. With this in mind, his ideological finger pointing on crime is easily discredited. Without turning the first page of the FBI Uniform Crime Reports' city-by-city breakdowns, we see that the annual Crime Index (the combined totals of violent crimes and property crimes committed per 100,000 persons in a given year) zoomed from 1,695 to 7,527 in Amarillo, Texas between 1968 and 1992. In those same years, the CI leaped from 1,535 to 4,590 in Abilene, Texas and rocketed from 1,372 to 5,866 in Augusta, Georgia. These are crime rate increases of hundreds of percent. Are we to assume these rock-ribbed Bible Belt hamlets were peddling in "free markets of morals"? Were they swimming in waves of "liberal pity and condescension" too?

Then there is Defining Deviancy Downward. Oh, I grant you: activities such as hookers turning tricks in parked cars are a blight in any circumstance. The Broken Window Theory absolutely has validity and applications towards solving or preventing crimes. But there is also the stench of a hidden agenda lurking here. In the war against DDD, shall we start arresting homosexuals for violating anti-sodomy statutes? Shall we re-criminalize abortion? Shall we repeal no-fault divorce? Perhaps Siegel would respond that he's merely talking about morality on the street ("the deregulation of public space" and "the politics of public order") whereas these other issues don't count because they relate to morality behind closed doors. Clever, but you need not be a certified cynic to wonder if his cheerleaders on the right would make the same distinction, and why is it necessary to smoke him out like this? If Siegel agrees with the far right on homosexuality, abortion and divorce, wonderful so long as he surrenders any pretense to being a (ahem) "centrist." If instead he can't stomach this much of the right's agenda, then he must concede that a "free market of morals" has its advantages after all. There is no third option.

Of course Siegel plays the welfare/illegitimacy card in all its glory. (Of course readers will wear their eyeballs out searching for his fleeting, glancing reference to corporate welfare.) The illegitimacy "crisis" is almost entirely a figment of the Republican/New Democrat imagination. To make a long story short, far and away the primary reason the PERCENTAGE of illegitimate births has risen since 1960 is because of a declining number of IN WEDLOCK births, not because of a rising number of OUT OF WEDLOCK births. Read that sentence again. All the anecdotal evidence on Earth won't change it. (Curious readers should take a gander at chapter 7 of UP FROM CONSERVATISM also by Michael Lind - I'm not the guy's publicist, I swear! - and decide for themselves which analysis is more salient in the larger scheme of things.)

There is more nitpicking, major and minor, to be done, but these observations will do. If you're extremely interested in the recent history of New York, DC and Los Angeles go ahead and read this book. As history, TFOHH has its uses at least so far as it goes. Just brace yourself for some overheated editorializing and extemely slanted analysis.

The author has written what might have been an excellent history of three major American urban areas since World War II; the book certainly offers the reader a lot to think about and discusses many issues of major concern to big cities. It is not until almost 95 percent of the way through the book that Siegel reveals he was a member of New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani's transition team when he was first elected; knowing that fact makes all the difference in understanding the neoconservative bias that pervades the book. (I naively bought the book expecting it to be objective because of its author's academic affiliation.)

I found the book's analysis of the race riots of the 1960s (and the more recent riots in Los Angeles) to be disturbingly simplistic; it reminds me of the late Edward Banfield's writings on "rioting for fun and profit." Siegel has at best a callous view of the urban underclass and little empathy for the plight of minorities trapped in the inner cities. Among his personal demons are mayors John Lindsay and Tom Bradley, neither of whom deserves the rather short shrift he gives them. (While each of them had their faults, they were to some extent visionaries and innovators; Siegel sees virtually nothing good about their adminisrations.)

I had also expected the book to draw some comparisons among the three cities on which it focuses. (After all, why present three case examples if you aren't going to contrast them?) But the histories of the three cities might just as well have been published separately. Little attempt is made to draw lessons from their three disparate recent histories.

Although the book was published in 1997--and one cannot expect the author to have foreseen the future--a single assertion perhaps best characterizes the book's deficiencies. Siegel makes the point that those who characterized Rudy Giuliani as racially insensitive and showing proto-fascist leanings had certainly exaggerated their portrait of him. The developments in the Dialo and Louima cases over the last year alone certainly suggest otherwise.

And the election of Anthony Williams in Washington seems to indicate that Siegel's pessimistic view of that city was overly overstated. (He characterizes the city as inextricably linked to politicians like "mayor-for-life" Marion Berry and his ilk.) As a person who works in Washington, I feel that Mayor Williams offers a lot of hope for the city.

I do not altogether regret that I read this book, but I feel that as an academician, the author was obligated to clearly state his biases at the outset of the book. That way the reader could at least have put the book in the proper context.