As newly elected head of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, Baltimore City Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake called on her fellow mayors across the country last week to develop new approaches to the problems facing urban America. The old model of looking to the federal government to set the country's urban agenda is no longer tenable in an era of deep budget cuts and sequestration in Washington. If cities are to thrive in the future they're going to have to take the lead on a whole range of issues once handled by federal agencies, from housing, unemployment and public education to mass transit, public health and crime.
That's the essence of the "Baltimore Compact" Ms. Rawlings-Blake is proposing her fellow mayors adopt when they meet here in September. The plan represents a recognition that cities will still need the federal government to do the things cities can't do themselves, such as continue to support a robust safety net and fund investments in basic scientific research. Those investments have an enormous effect on the quality of life in cities because science and the safety net play an outsized role in undergirding the economies of urban communities. They are the new infrastructure an urban America in which cities that once were built along rivers are now built along rivers of federal research dollars.
But for the traditional projects once handled by huge federal agencies such as the Department of Housing and Urban Development cities are going to have to find smarter ways to achieve the same ends. Officials are going to have to be very clear about setting realistic goals, and more strategic about leveraging public-private partnerships and philanthropic aid. In the past, federal aid to cities often came with one-size-fits-all restrictions on how the money could be used, regardless of whether those rules made sense. In the coming era cities will have to tailor their efforts to the particular needs of local communities and programs, and to do that they'll need greater freedom and flexibility in how dollars are spent.
Ultimately, cities may have to start thinking of the federal government as just one of many investors that happens to dominate certain parts of the their agenda but is just a partner in others. Under the Obama administration there's been an evolution of federal urban policy away from a focus mainly on compliance issues and toward building stronger partnerships with cities.
Examples of that approach include the Strong Cities, Strong Communities Initiative, which focuses on economically distressed cities like Baltimore and deploys teams of federal experts in mayors' offices and municipal departments to provide technical assistance in economic development and planning for up to two years. Another such partnership is the administration's Promise Zones program, which performs basically the same function on the neighborhood level in areas of concentrated poverty and aims to build up local residents' capacity to improve their own and their children's lives from the grass roots up much as the Harlem Children's Zone does in New York City.
There's no solution to every city's problems, because the issues facing mayors today are multifaceted and their solutions interdependent. What is needed is a holistic approach that is tailored to the needs of particular communities and programs. And much as we like to say mayors have to do more on their own, one can't lose sight of fact that in order to address inequalities that exist in urban metropolitan regions the federal government still needs to invest more resources that flow to cities.
Ms. Rawlings-Blake's proposal acknowledges that Baltimore needs to look beyond a few big federal agencies for help and get its own act together, and she's using her position as president of the mayor's conference to frame an urban agenda in a way that gives her fellow mayors an opportunity to collectively come up with strategies tailored to the cities they lead. That's smart politics and smart governance, because if her approach can work in Baltimore it can probably succeed anywhere.