Crossposted at The Politicizer
Once upon a time, West Baltimore was a bustling mixed-income community that characterized a typical industrialized American city. The hub of Baltimore’s large African American community, West Baltimore attracted droves of Southern African Americans throughout the Great Migration. Back then, well-paying manufacturing jobs were plentiful and the city’s job market could accommodate the trainloads of low-skilled southern African Americans that poured into the city. In our contemporary service-sector oriented economy, however, Baltimore’s well-paying manufacturing jobs are nowhere to be found and West Baltimore has decayed into the urban ghetto it is today.
West Baltimore is a tragic microcosm of the de-industrialized American inner city. The plight I lament in such cities, however, should not suggest that I want America to protect its way out of joining the 21st century economy. Instead, this article will focus on fiscal policy and how drastic cuts to essential social programs have exacerbated urban poverty.
Ronald Reagan’s Presidency ushered in an era of fiscal conservatism that prioritized spending cuts to crucial welfare programs in the inner-city. Before Reagan, the federal government accounted for 17.5% of total city budgets. Cities like Baltimore that struggled with a decaying manufacturing sector depended on the federal government for the majority of their funding. The federal government’s assistance to these cities provided for a wide range of services that mitigated the brutal of effects of poverty. From community development block grants to funding for mass transit maintenance and development, the federal government played a crucial role in compensating for an inner-city’s shrinking tax base. In 2000, well after Reagan’s tax cuts and Bill Clinton’s subsequent refusal to revert to the pre-Reagan norm of assisting the inner-city, the federal contribution of total city budgets was a mere 5.4%.
Reagan’s drastic transformation of the fiscal relationship between the federal government and urban municipalities’ coincided with the early stages of the crack cocaine and AIDS epidemics that ravaged urban America. Without assistance from the federal government, America’s fiscally starved inner-cities were forced to stand idly by as disease and drug-related violence compounded an already present host of economic problems. From West Baltimore to West Detroit, the remaining working and middle class families fled to the suburbs leaving behind the impoverished communities that now characterize our once bustling inner-cities. Additionally, as Reagan eviscerated government assistance to struggling inner-cities, he preserved funding for highway construction and other programs that assisted suburbs and accelerated urban flight.
Reagan achieved this assault on government assistance through demonizing America’s urban poor. It was Reagan who introduced the pejorative phrase "welfare queen" in his failed 1976 Presidential campaign that masterfully exploited racially charged misconceptions of welfare recipients. While Reagan’s hyperbolic tales of poor people ripping off the American government served his political ends, it obliterated America’s understanding of poverty’s structural dimension. In Reagan’s America, inner-city poverty can only be viewed as a problem so deeply ingrained in urban culture that it renders government assistance ultimately ineffective. Of course, this oversimplification of poverty ignores an entire structural dimension that addresses a host of economic factors that trump individual behavior.
During the Great Depression, shanty towns inhabited by America’s new swarms of homeless people were widely known as "Hoovervilles." Herbert Hoover is generally regarded as one of the worst Presidents in American history and is viewed as responsible for the blighted communities that bared his name. Ronald Reagan, on the other hand, ushered the American inner-city into an era of inexcusable despair, yet he remains one of the most celebrated figures in American politics. The American inner-city is nothing more than a collection of "Reaganvilles" that were tragically sacrificed at the altar of fiscal conservatism. He had a disciple in Bill Clinton whose endorsement of welfare reform perpetuated the Reaganesque misconception of poverty as a cultural problem. After both Bush Presidencies and the Clinton Presidency’s refusal to revert to pre-Reagan levels of government assistance, Barack Obama must prioritize urban relief programs. As the favorite son of an inner-city community, I’m cautiously hopeful that he will, but only time will tell.