First, there was urban renewal; then, there were model cities, and later there were urban development action grants.
Empowerment zones -- which will funnel $100 million in federal grants, plus tax breaks, to Baltimore and five other cities -- are the latest in a series of post-World War II government attempts to revitalize America's decaying inner cities.
But will they work any better than previous, equally ballyhooed federal programs in reversing the downward spiral of urban decline?
Conservative critics yesterday dismissed the centerpiece of the Clinton administration urban policy as just another government boondoggle, unlikely to make more than a dent in urban problems.
But urban experts said the empowerment zones' mix of social service grants, economic incentives and grass-roots participation makes them more likely to succeed. At the same time, those experts cautioned not to expect miracles.
"The most important thing in cities today is that you do something," said Charles Royer, director of the Institute of Politics at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.
But Mr. Royer, the former three-term mayor of Seattle, warned that it's "a very, very long process" to change a 50-year trend.
"There's something going on that's bigger than federal grants," he said. "We've had years and years of bleeding these places of jobs and resources. Nothing is going to turn them around overnight."
Many past efforts at urban revitalization failed because they followed a generalized blueprint created by the federal government instead of relying on individual communities to come up with plans, said J. W. Wheeler, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute in Indianapolis.
"I'm a very strong believer that federal programs will not work unless you have local buy-in," he said. "If you go back to the old Model Cities, all the implementation was at a federal level. I think if you're going to solve some of these problems, you've got to deal with them at a very local level."
The persistent problems of poverty, crime, federal cutbacks and the migration of middle-class families to the suburbs requires metropolitan strategies, said Tom Kingsley, director of the Center for Public Finance and Housing at the Urban Institute in Washington. Nevertheless, he is optimistic about the empowerment zones -- for the same reason.
"They're not coming in with solutions from the outside," he said of the federal government. "The theme behind this is that you don't do this just with the local government, you do it with all the institutions, the churches, the schools, the police, all of the stakeholders being part of the process. Locally, you decide what your priorities are."
Others say the success of federal urban programs, including empowerment zones, depends less on the concept behind them than on how the money is used.
"If the money is well-spent, there is no reason why it won't be effective," said Robert C. Embry Jr., head of Baltimore's Abell Foundation.
Mr. Embry, a former city and federal housing official, cited as an example the urban development action grant that was used to construct the downtown Hyatt Regency. "That was a tremendous catalyst for the Inner Harbor," he said.
While the empowerment zone won't instantly solve all the city's urban problems, he said, "The city is better off than if it hadn't gotten it. It gives the city an opportunity it otherwise wouldn't have had."
Others agree. "If it is spent wisely and used on innovative programs, it can make a difference," said Marc V. Levine, director of the Center for Economic Development at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
But Mr. Levine, who has studied Baltimore's renaissance, added, "One should not be unrealistic about the expectations of what that can do. . . It would be unfair to expect that it is going to promote a second Baltimore renaissance."
Michael Allan Wolf, director of the Enterprise Zone Project at the University of Richmond, said there was a need for a federal empowerment zone because state and local enterprise zones can't offer enough incentives to "generate significant turnaround."
A key to the empowerment zones' success is using the federal money to leverage city, state and private sources, which in Baltimore officials say will total $800 million. "I think the pieces are in place for it to work," Mr. Wolf said. But he cautioned, "If we have the same-old, same-old, money will get wasted and people will get frustrated."
But Robert Rector, a senior policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation, derided the very idea of empowerment zones as liberal politics-as- usual.
If the Clinton administration really wanted to empower people, he said, it should give inner-city residents school vouchers.
"What Clinton is adept at is stealing conservative labels and applying them to big-government ideas," Mr. Rector said.
Jack Kemp, former U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development and an advocate of the idea of giving tax breaks to encourage investments in distressed areas, agreed.
"The Clinton empowerment zone plan masquerades as a free-enterprise approach, but it is really a throwback to the top-down, subsidized [programs], which have dominated liberals' thinking on poverty since the Great Society," Mr. Kemp, a potential Republican presidential candidate in 1996, said in a statement.
Mr. Kemp said the tax incentives in the Clinton proposal were "weak, misguided and misdirected." He said they placed too much emphasis on wage credits and neglected giving tax breaks to investors in new businesses.