By Dr. Yvonne Scruggs Leftwich

The Platform Committee and the strategists for the Democratic Party should turn their attention to the state of America's cities. Not only is there no active National Urban Policy to set standards and provide guidance for reinforcing the diversity - economic as well as ethnic - of cities, but the expeditionary forces of gentrification conspire to make cities accessible only to those who are rich.

This strategy of exclusion explains the unconscionable abandonment and dereliction of duty by governments in the Katrina and Rita-devastated Gulf Region. It also results in the alarming infra-structure deterioration, decrease of affordable housing and also, of accessible public services in all major American cities, beginning with metropolises like New York, Boston, Los Angeles, Chicago and certainly including New Orleans and other flood-drenched cities, as well as all American cities from coast to coast.

The Federal government's social contract with the urban incubators of equitable upward mobility, has been breeched and must be reinstated. The Federal responsibility to resurrect the Congressionally approved National Urban Policy (1979) or, alternatively, to advance an up-dated National Urban Policy for ALL people, not only for the rich, appears to have been ignored and/or abandoned by the White House and Congress. Congress has permitted the elimination of the one oversight Congressional Committee which guided and monitored policies effecting cities for decades -the House Committee on Housing, Banking and Urban Affairs. It's mandate has been scattered so widely that there now is no "there" there. And no one is guarding the urban chicken-house but the rich foxes.

I urge you and all Democrats to read: CONSENSUS AND COMPROMISE: CREATING THE FIRST NATIONAL URBAN POLICY UNDER PRESIDENT CARTER by Yvonne Scruggs-Leftwich, to be reminded that it is, in fact, possible for the Federal government to help cities in becoming decent and affordable places which are accessible, not only to the wealthy, but also to working people, to Blacks, Latinos and other ethnic minorities, to families and to middle class Americans as well.

Posted by Dr. Yvonne Scruggs-Leftwich at August 24, 2006 01:19 PM

Note Dr. Yvonne Scruggs-Leftwich is the former Deputy Assistant Secretary for Planning and Area-wide Concerns of U.S. HUD ; Executive Director, President Carter's Urban and Regional Policy Group  which presented the first Congressionally-passed National Urban Policy in 1979 ; Commissioner, New York State Division of Housing and Community Renewal in Gov. Mario Cuomo's Cabinet (1982 – 1985); The Deputy Mayor, City of Philadelphia, Pa., (June 1985 – 1987); Chair, Department of City and Regional Planning, Howard University; 1974 – 1981).  She holds a Ph.D from the University of Pennsylvania in City and Regional Planning, Urban Policy and Public Administration.