-------------------- Rust Belt Cities May Be Seeing A Rebirth --------------------

By MIKE SWIFT
Courant Staff Writer
June 5, 2002

Long beset by population flight, racial separation and urban poverty, Detroit had something to celebrate - cautiously - with the release of earnings statistics this week from the 2000 Census.

Income was up sharply during the 1990s. Poverty was down. The median price of a home in the Motor City doubled.

"I want to believe it, but there's still some things I just can't explain," said Kurt Metzger, research director at the Center for Urban Studies at Wayne State University. "If Detroit can come back, my God, we all have a chance."

In a pattern repeated across the Midwest, Rust Belt cities like Detroit, Cleveland, Gary, Ind., and Flint, Mich., while still among the nation's poorest, are showing unexpected signs of economic life.

"Certainly here in northeast Ohio, we were very surprised," said Claudia Coulton, director of the Center on Urban Poverty and Social Change at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland.

Cities like Cleveland and Detroit, Coulton said, "are not cities that became largely gentrified. There was important building of new housing and restoration of housing which could be seen as gentrification, but that's not a big part of the story. I think there was a real improvement in income for the families that had been living there."

The portrait of urban America being presented during the past month as the results of the 2000 Census are gradually reported remains complicated and unclear. That picture will only gradually resolve itself as academics and planners scrutinize the data in the coming months and years.

One fact already clear is that not all cities fared equally well. The Northeast, in particular, lagged behind other regions. But in much of urban America, there are hopeful signs:

Household income grew in 21 of the nation's 25 largest cities during the 1990s, even accounting for inflation.

Poverty rates were down in about two-thirds of the largest 25 cities, although the number of people in poverty jumped in many cities, including New York and Los Angeles. The federal poverty threshold in 1999, the year the census recorded incomes, was $10,869 for a two-person household.

With a few exceptions - Hartford among the most notable - the nation's poorest cities benefited from those positive trends along with wealthier communities.

"The poorest cities almost across the board saw a decline in the number of people in poverty," said Alan Berube, an analyst at the Brookings Institution. "They got so far down that they had nowhere to go but up."

In the West, the Silicon Valley boom of the late '90s was clear in the income gains in San Jose and San Francisco. The trends were also positive in big Texas cities, with Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, Austin and El Paso all recording income gains of more than 5 percent after inflation, with no increase in poverty rate.

But many of the big cities that fared the worst during the 1990s were in the East Coast axis between Boston and Washington, D.C. Baltimore, Philadelphia, Washington and New York City all had increasing poverty rates, with declining or stagnant household incomes. The 2000 Census reported similar woes for smaller cities in the Northeast corridor, including Newark, Providence, Hartford, New Haven and Bridgeport.

"It's a very diverse story about what's going on in cities," said Bruce Katz, director of the Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy at the Brookings Institution. "The '90s were not a boring decade in the United States, they were a decade of really volatile change."

Finding a one-size-fits-all explanation for those changes will almost certainly prove impossible, experts said. And a fuller sense of what is happening in American cities must wait until the Census Bureau reports income and poverty statistics at the neighborhood level later this year.

Although the numbers are small, the 2000 Census reported last year that many downtown areas gained population during the 1990s. One key question is whether cities' income gains are a result of wealthier people moving back to the city or are due to growing earnings among those who never left.

In other words, how much of the gains is due to what Katz calls "the Starbucks and [stadiums] phenomenon," and how much reflects real improvements in the quality of life in urban neighborhoods outside downtown.

There is no agreement on that question.

"There seems to be a great deal of revitalization that went on in places like Chicago and Cleveland and even Detroit," said William Hudnut, a former mayor of Indianapolis and a senior fellow at the Urban Land Institute in Washington, D.C. "There are now cohorts of people that are interested in the amenities of urban living - mainly empty-nesters, childless couples and young singles, and the laptop crowd. Cities through the '90s made a concerted effort to revitalize themselves, and those [census] statistics indicate their efforts paid off."

Other experts, such as Coulton, say the primary reason why cities did better, at least in the Midwest, was the strength of the economy during the last half of the 1990s. Welfare reform was less of a factor than the availability of jobs, she said.

"We're really talking about the very low unemployment rates which allowed people who before hadn't been able to get into the labor market, to get into a secure position in the labor market," Coulton said.

In Detroit, households with earnings increased from 66 percent to 75 percent of all households, but Metzger said demographers are questioning the quality of those new jobs.

"We keep thinking that a lot of these service jobs and low-income jobs are pushing people just over the poverty threshold," he said.

Perhaps the most cheering statistic from the new census, Coulton said, was the fact that poverty among families headed by a single mother stopped growing - even as that index remained dramatically higher than in much of the country.

"We need to not lose sight of the fact that we still have half of the children under 5 [in Cleveland] who are poor," she said.

Foreign immigration almost certainly played a role in holding down income and adding to the number of people in poverty in New York and Los Angeles, experts say. Combined, the nation's two largest cities gained about 440,000 poor people during the past 10 years.

In New York, officials say the fact that the 1990 Census missed so many people may have made the poverty results from the 2000 Census appear worse than they actually were. The 2000 Census is generally acknowledged to have done a better job in accounting for people in cities than the 1990 Census.

Even after Wall Street's record run during the late '90s, Manhattan was the only New York City borough that had a poverty decrease during the decade, but the improvement was minimal. Even in booming Boston, where incomes climbed nearly 5 percent after inflation, poverty was up, too.

Older, East Coast cities are forced to grapple with a host of problems younger cities don't have, including older, less attractive housing, and aging sewers, streets and schools. There also is a question of timing: Midwestern cities might look relatively better because they were at a particularly low economic ebb in 1989, the year for which income and poverty statistics were recorded for the 1990 Census.

And there is yet another explanation for the income gains recorded by many cities in the Sun Belt and West compared with cities like Philadelphia or Hartford, whose political boundaries were set decades, even centuries, ago, said David Rusk, an urban scholar and former mayor of Albuquerque, N.M.

In other parts of the country, cities are able to annex land outside their boundaries, which in the Northeast are politically independent, and often affluent, suburbs.

Rusk said cities that were blocked from extending their boundaries saw an increase in poverty rates on average during the 1990s. Cities such as Austin or San Antonio that annexed land, or cities such as Nashville that have combined their government with that of the surrounding county, tended to see declines in poverty, Rusk said.

"At the end of the most prosperous decade in the nation's history, poverty rates were down in a lot of places," he said. "But in terms of boundary-constrained cities, they were still up."

Copyright 2002, Hartford Courant