Customer Reviews

Inside Game/Outside Game: Winning Strategies for Saving Urban America (Century Foundation Books (Brookings Hardcover))

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Rusk's book roots out the causes of concentrated urban poverty, proposes solutions, and provides examples of success stories. Rusk convincingly argues that poor racial minorities should be welcome to live in functional neighborhoods, such as the suburbs. I attended a conference at which Rusk discussed "Inside Game, Outside Game," and I was delighted to hear one politician declare that that book should be required reading for every politician in my state. I agree.

The biggest obstacle Americans suffer to any sort of progress on urban problems is the Big Lie that after being forced to lie in their own excrement for decades, America's poorest cities can right themselves through a little more efficiency (in the conservative version) or Great Society spending on "community development" (in the liberal version). Rusk shows why community development doesn't work, and also shows why most cities (other than a few immigration hubs like NYC and Sun Belt cities with unlimited annexation powers) simply can't compete with their suburbs without outside help (or at least without a termination of outside hostility, such as highway spending that drags development ever further into the suburbs): if a city has no tax base and poor people who make public services more expensive, it can't compete with the suburbs, efficiency or no efficiency. Like Cities without Suburbs (also by Rusk), this is a masterpiece.