- - - - - - - - - - - -

Also Today

For a full list of today's Salon News stories, go to the News home page.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Tuesday's visit is part of a four-day trip designed to call attention to the administration's New Markets Initiative, its fledgling effort to jump-start economic development efforts in areas of the country that have been bypassed by the now 8-year-old economic expansion. The president began his tour in Appalachia, and later in the week he will visit a rundown section of Phoenix and finish his tour in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles.

Clinton's trip is designed to make a political and social point: Nationwide unemployment may be down to 4.3 percent, but in the rubble-strewn lots of America's older inner cities, and even in the downtrodden parts of its fast-growing Sunbelt ones, too many neighborhoods continue to suffer from substandard housing, high unemployment and the growing concentration of the nation's dwindling but hardest-to-employ welfare population.

The president has dragged along high-powered executives like Richard Huber of Aetna Insurance and former budget chief Franklin Raines, now at Fannie Mae, to highlight the central motif of the tour: that the most impoverished areas of America's cities should really be seen as emerging markets, a kind of Indonesia within our own borders. With a few well-chosen tax breaks and government help programs (they've even dubbed one the American Private Investment Corp., modeled on the Overseas Private Investment Corp.), townhouses, warehouses and shopping malls will soon be blooming on urban plots that now contain only the graffiti-scarred walls of abandoned factories.

It's an enticing vision, and there is no shortage of recent anecdotes to back up its proponents' claims. New townhouses are sprouting in downtown Chicago, and there's a flowering of small businesses and single-family homes in the South Bronx. And then there's the comeback of downtowns across America as entertainment destinations for bored suburbanites looking for something beyond the thrill of another day at the mall.

Those signs of urban life have led many politicians and inner-city advocates to embrace the ideas of Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter, whose Initiative for a Competitive Inner City has tried to get the nation to think of poor neighborhoods as big, untapped markets, rather than as cesspools of dysfunction best served by social service agencies. Porter's ideas, combined with the signs of urban revival evident around the country, have convinced Clinton that the best hope for inner-city renewal lies with the private sector.

That would be nice, but it isn't true.

Next page | The urban middle class is shrinking