National-Local Relations and the City's Dilemma

Core cities face a dilemma when they must extend services to residents who are less able to pay taxes commensurate with their needs. In this article, national program responses to the city's dilemma made in the 1970s are compared with responses advocated in the 1980s. By the mid-1970s, national programs attended to the city's dilemma through national-local relations aimed at reducing central-city disparities and through relations between citizens and the national government that focused on assisting the less well-off. President Reagan rejected these approaches and advocated making cities economic enterprises, moving the arena of action to the states via block grants, changing the national government's rules governing local finances, and defunding many urban programs attentive to central-city needs. Reagan's partial successes shifted the debate from how the national government should reconcile the city's dilemma to how states and cities should deal with their own problems. The experiences of the 1970s and 1980s offer policymakers two competing models for the 1990s.