Urban Outfitters

Inner-city businesses are finding that some of their best friends are in city hall. The mayors of many cities across America -- including Austin, Chicago, Cleveland, and Denver -- are aggressively shaping the future of their respective downtown districts.

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Big-city mayors are eager to make revivified inner cities a part of their legacies

John F. Street has declared war. In his inaugural speech, at the beginning of this year, the new mayor of Philadelphia vowed to take back from poverty the city's toughest neighborhoods, including his political home base of North Philadelphia. "I will launch an all-out, systematic effort to remove blighted buildings and reclaim the overgrown, polluted lots that dot our city," Street proclaimed. "We will turn a negative into a positive and work with neighborhood residents, political leaders, and local businesses to return this land to useful purposes."

The mayor has his work cut out for him. North Philadelphia, suffering from the vicissitudes wrought by a quarter century of neglect, is a virtual showplace of inner-city ills. And although he has an urban pedigree, that doesn't mean Street will be the mean streets' most effective champion. A generally reticent, sometimes prickly man (he once got into a fistfight during a city council meeting), the mayor has some critics worried that he lacks the political finesse to get the job done. Then there's the long shadow cast by his predecessor. The most popular and charismatic mayor Philadelphia had produced in decades, Ed Rendell left office this year to chair the Democratic National Committee, handpicked for the position by Bill Clinton and Al Gore. His approval rating at the time of his departure was 77%.

The cult of Rendell reached national proportions following the publication of A Prayer for the City (Random House, 1997), a book by Buzz Bissinger that lauds the former mayor as a champion of beleaguered neighborhoods. Rendell also has his critics, those who argue that while the mayor turned around parts of the city, he largely ignored its most intractable section. "North Philadelphia has the worst slums I've ever seen in my life, equal to the South Bronx of the 1970s," says Fred Siegel, a senior fellow at the center-left Progressive Policy Institute, in Washington, D.C. "Rendell was a very good mayor who restored pride and fiscal stability to the city. But he fairly left North Philadelphia to fester and rot." Street has made saving Philadelphia's inner city a crusade, and many will judge his administration on that mission's success or failure.

Although urban poverty isn't among the top-tier issues being debated in the presidential race this year, Siegel believes it will command attention at the city level for some time. The story of Philadelphia's mayors demonstrates the current potency of the issue, even in a time of unprecedented national prosperity. "A long list of mayors are hot on this," Siegel says. "Interest in it goes coast to coast and cuts across parties, from Rudolph Giuliani in New York to Jerry Brown in Oakland. Everybody at this point at least pays lip service to this."

But if mayors agree that inner cities deserve saving, they don't necessarily agree on how to save them. Predictably, most fund a variety of business-development programs: tax breaks for businesses, low-interest loans, and the like. Beyond the basics, however, their strategies diverge:

• In Indianapolis, former mayor Stephen Goldsmith cleaned up parcels of brown-field land adjacent to the interstate highways that bisect the city and then personally recruited businesspeople to locate new companies there.
• In Charleston, S.C., Mayor Joe Riley heavily promotes tourism and uses the proceeds from a hotel tax to fund housing and minority-business-loan programs.
• In Kansas City, Mo., Mayor Kay Barnes is upgrading inner-city housing stock, betting that good, affordable residences will attract people who in turn will attract businesses.
• In Los Angeles, Mayor Richard Riordan is working with the large immigrant population to encourage start-ups in the city's burgeoning garment district.

Like anything that comes out of a city hall (or a statehouse -- or the White House, for that matter), policies for inner-city development have both their boosters and their detractors, and depend for their success, in part, on the administration's money-raising prowess and the mayor's talent for showmanship. What follow are profiles of four other cities whose mayors are making inner-city renewal a centerpiece of their administrations. The success or failure of those experiments will help write the rules of social and economic reform for years to come.

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Mike Hofman

Mike Hofman was previously editor of Inc.com and a deputy editor at Inc. magazine, which he joined in 1996. The site was nominated for a National Magazine Award for Digital Media in 2010, and was named the best business website by Folio Magazine. In 2006, Hofman was part of a team of writers nominated for a Webby Award for best business blog. He lives in New York City.

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