The kinder critics think of empowerment zones as programmatic chicken soup, a thin broth of good cheer prescribed for stubborn fever: The patient will know someone cares, but his temperature probably won't go down.
Less charitable, more political detractors see liberals heaving money at problems without regard for a history of failure dating to President Lyndon B. Johnson's much-maligned War on Poverty.
A succession of big spending programs, according to this thinking, has done little to suggest that government can solve problems for cities and the poor.
But the doubters may tend to forget that soup of some sort is preferable to an empty bowl -- and some of them may be unfamiliar with important changes in the patient.
Optimists predict the zones will surprise. Communities are already more empowered than they were in the frenzied anti-poverty days, having learned from their mistakes.
More confident community leaders will be able to negotiate without assuming automatically that the world is against them. Political power centers are will be less threatened by anti-poverty patronage jobs they don't control.
Businesses see self-interest in livable cities, in safe streets and in qualified workers: Auto companies are contributing, for example, to the zones in Detroit.
For the six cities that will have them, of course, the criticism is no more than background noise now. Cut off from the old days of generous federal grants, cities across the country worked feverishly over the last 18 months to win one of the six available grants. Washington will now send $100 million in cash and $225 million in tax credits to Baltimore and each of five other cities for a variety of programs ranging from job development to crime control. Several rural areas will get grants as well.
Over the course of the program's life in Baltimore, as much as $800 million more in other commitments could be spent in the zone. The numbers are not insignificant, but the scope of the problems is vast.
"You need a starting point, a perception of hope and change that brings enthusiasm with it," says Gov.-elect Parris N. Glendening. "For those who dismiss this effort, I say shame on them unless they have things to put on the table."
During his campaign, the former Prince George's County executive said he wanted to create a "directed growth" program, offering loans, grants and tax relief for each worker employed in a targeted neighborhood. He had thought this initiative might have to wait, but now Mr. Glendening says he will propose legislation this year to complement the federal program with matching state tax credits. The incentives would be available for businesses locating in depressed areas throughout the state, not just in Baltimore.
Mr. Glendening says one aspect of the current political landscape appears to offer added potential.
Absence of conflict
"For the first time in three decades in Maryland we have a president, a governor and a mayor who know each other who can work on a personal level," he said. Since the late 1970s, conflicts between a president and a governor or between a mayor and a governor have made real cooperation between governments much more difficult, he says.
Baltimore Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke's early support for President Clinton's campaign in 1992 is given some credit -- along with a "brilliant" application by Michael V. Seipp of the Baltimore
Development Corp. and Baltimore's record of growth under Mayor William Donald Schaefer -- for the city's success.
Mr. Glendening knows that the zone idea will have opponents even in Maryland: "I would say to the rest of the state, one of the things that drains the budget is the level of assistance that we correctly must give to the city. Every success it has in bringing private investment and jobs means less tax burden elsewhere."
In addition to easing the pain of poverty, reducing the tax burden is the objective. To reach it, though, cities like Baltimore will swim against the current of history.
"Of all the governmental interventions, getting businesses to start up in the ghetto is the one with the the least good track record," said Nicholas Lemann, author of "The Promised Land," a study of urbanization, poverty and government programs.
Presidential politics, he has written, provides the best argument for the zones. Since they offer aid to businesses and seem to focus heavily on job training, they were thought to have some support even among opponents of any social spending.
"In fairness to President Clinton, his thrust is to do poverty programs that aren't labeled as poverty programs," Mr. Lemann said.
But Mr. Lemann and others worry that another failed project may further erode support for programs that have a better chance to succeed.
"The thing I would have the most confidence in," he said, "is something to create small, tightly controlled low-income housing. That's where the track record is the best." He would also favor "some heavy elementary school intervention, extending Head Start through the elementary schools."
Aspects of each alternative idea will be part of the expanded and revised program in Baltimore, according to its planners. The housing and neighborhood development in Sandtown-Winchester will be a beneficiary of the new money, for example. As a result of various criticisms, the programs have moved beyond business development to more comprehensive neighborhood improvements.
And in this revision, the zone managers may need to redefine their efforts for the public.
"This program is perceived as something designed to create a lot of new business activity. If it doesn't do that it may give the Republicans something to point at. They are still running against the Great Society [of President Johnson's] 25 years later. They really know how to make a lot of a failed policy," Mr. Lemann said.
Last week, for example, an old fan of enterprise zones, a plan to give businesses tax breaks and other incentives to businesses in depressed areas, turned up as an enemy of the program announced by Mr. Clinton.
Republican Jack Kemp, a likely candidate for president, favored the zones when he was the Bush administration's secretary of housing and urban development. Now. he finds the zones lacking.
'Republican boondoggle'
They are attacked from the liberal side as well: They've been called "just another Republican boondoggle."
New Republic senior editor Mickey Kaus, whose book about social welfare policy is called "The End of Equality," says "the way to assimilate the underclass is to go with the flow, to encourage movement out, not to try to lure people back into the most depressed communities."
SG The real hope for dealing with poverty, he says, lies in welfare re
form: "It gets at how people manage to survive now and says you'll have to survive in a different way."
None of this is happening in a vacuum, of course, and Mr. Seipp says Baltimore's program will address an important reality in the welfare reform dilemma: Many recipients are not job ready. To make a transition from welfare to work possible, he says, the zone will look for ways to prepare welfare recipients and others for the jobs it hopes new businesses will bring.
"We are trying to be very realistic," he says. "We have large problems in these communities. The missing link is jobs. But what should we do, move into a Republican tough-love welfare system where you get get six months to get over the employment hurdle and then you're on your own? Or should we try to take a look at each of the many jobless groups out there and look for ways to help each?"
Rep. Kweisi Mfume, a Democrat from Maryland's 7th District, says the zones have a better chance because they will be focused on economic development.
"When we ask what is a ghetto, it's an area of trade deficit and talent surplus. A slum is an area without a circular flow of capital. The patient has a clot. Or the patient has anemia, but in both cases the patient dies. To prevent that result, we have to have a circular flow of capital. I don't think any program has ever tried to create that."
Local ideas
The empowerment idea has legitimacy, Mr. Mfume and others say, because its programs are based on the prescriptions and diagnoses of the people who live in the zones.
"The more comprehensive you make it, the more inclusive you make the planning process, the more likely it is will be successful -- if you have the resources," says Talton F. Ray, former president of the national Council for Community-Based Development.
"One of the things that's been impressive about the zone process is the rigor involved in the planning at the local level. It helps ensure that the development is bought into by the people who ultimately have to deliver on it and benefit from it."
Earlier, federal authorities arrived to impose their "intellectual constructs." Despite the economic opportunity act's demand for "maximum feasible participation of the poor," the War on Poverty and other programs were driven often by outsiders and outside ideas.
"One of the beauties of the current plan is that it builds on existing organizations. This can be done because, over the last 15 years, a lot of work has been done in communities across the country," Mr. Ray said.
City Halls are run in many cities now by African-American political descendants of the first wave of community leadership. Having participated in or witnessed the demands of community groups, moreover, the political leaders of today may be less likely to be threatened by new programs. In Baltimore's case, the program has the clear approval, backing and control of the mayor's office.
"Legitimately established leadership and political leaders can work together now on common agendas," said Mr. Ray, who helped direct rehabilitation efforts during the 1980s in the South Bronx.
With $100 million in empowerment "soup," he says, "You can accomplish a fair amount. You have cities that can take full advantage of this money in ways they couldn't before."
C. Fraser Smith is a reporter for The Baltimore Sun.