What size is the right size for future Philadelphia?
Comparison of police forces, taxes in major cities
Changes in city services, 1952-1998
The move to the suburbs

New urban strategy

In the early 1990s, a group of innovative mayors - led by Philadelphia's Ed Rendell - realized that cities no longer could turn to the federal government to bail them out of economic hard times. Instead, they focused on ways cities could help themselves with less federal money or interference.

This new urban strategy reflects three great themes: devolution of authority; a war on dependence in all its forms, and the application of market models. In city government, these meant businesslike methods of management, privatization of many services, retrenchment of spending on social services and income redistribution, and the struggle to retain and attract jobs.

Despite notable successes, important questions remain. Will the new strategies work in an economic downturn? Private services proved disastrous failures in cities early in the 20th century. Why should we expect privatization today to work better? Is the privatization of services worth denying hundreds or thousands of workers their health benefits and a living wage?

Where does the public interest collide with the search for profit? What are the limits of market models in public policy?

These are great questions that should underlie debate about "rightsizing" city government.

- Michael B. Katz, Sheldon and Lucy Hackney Professor of History and codirector of the graduate certificate program in urban studies at the University of Pennsylvania

Effective budgeting

In cities such as Philadelphia, with a large low-income population, reducing the tax burden can be an act of social justice.

There are some positive tools any mayor should use to determine the size of his budget. Perhaps the most important one is this rule: Make sure your budget grows less than the rate of inflation. Easy to figure out, easy to implement.

If your wage settlements are over the rate of inflation, you'll have to reduce the size of government somewhere else and find ways to increase productivity and improve services. That's what the private sector does every year, and our national GDP has been growing 1 or 2 percent each year. If you can do the same thing every year in the public sector, you can avoid crisis.

Downsize through attrition rather than layoffs wherever possible. That's made easier if you can keep government growth under the rate of inflation. We've increased spending on the police, but reduced everything else.

Finally, measurement. Find reliable ways to measure how things are going. That's the one way you'll know a result is a result.

- John O. Norquist,

mayor of Milwaukee

Better, not just bigger

The simplest equation in American life - and in the life of American cities - has always been Bigger Is Better.

The equation made sense enough from the end of the Civil War until the end of the Second World War. During that period, American cities such as New York, Chicago and Philadelphia grew to unprecedented size, and along with that size came wealth, culture and political influence. But since the 1950s, Philadelphia, along with virtually every other Northeastern and Midwestern city, has been getting smaller.

I can't help wondering whether this urban free-fall was really inevitable. Perhaps it could have been mitigated if we had changed our basic assumption. Maybe bigger wasn't better after all.

As long ago as the 1920s and '30s, many architects and planners, Lewis Mumford most notably, argued that American cities had grown too big. Learn to plan not for growth, Mumford argued, but to make things smaller and more humane.

"Right-sizing" the city should begin with its physical fabric. We could look at the creation of major areas of green space, especially in North and South Philly. Perhaps many of the city's narrow streets and back alleys should be closed to traffic and converted to places where kids could play more safely.

William Penn founded Philadelphia as a utopian experiment in religious tolerance and city planning. That 17th-century vision might serve the city well as we enter the 21st.

- Steven Conn (Conn.23@osu.edu), professor of history

 at Ohio State University

Throwaway land

It might be hard to believe, but Detroit is now on the cutting edge of urban development. Since 1950, Detroit has lost half its population. Some 60,000 vacant lots and abandoned buildings mar the city's landscape. But Detroit's throwaway land has become gold for a few savvy real estate developers. They are constructing suburban-style subdivisions in places written off as hopeless just a few years ago.

Philadelphia's advocates of rightsizing see a similar future. Today, the city has nearly 27,000 vacant lots and abandoned houses. Couldn't they be cleared and rebuilt? If Detroit is doing it, why can't we?

Unlike Detroit, it is difficult to assemble large parcels of land in a rowhouse town. Philadelphia's lots are small, and most redevelopment land deals are expensive and bewilderingly complex.

I propose an alternative. Let's turn our attention to the still-thriving but struggling neighborhoods that will be tomorrow's brownfields if we don't do something now. Many sections of the city are home to elderly people who can't afford to keep up their homes. Help them out before it's too late. Turn vacant lots over to homeowners who want bigger yards. Provide low-interest loans and incentives for home rehabilitation before structural decay is irreversible.

Offer below-market mortgage deals and property tax abatements for people who want to buy and rehabilitate houses for themselves in the city. Encourage investment in still viable neighborhood shopping districts. Let's build on our successes, not build over our failures.

- Thomas J. Sugrue,

 associate professor of history and sociology at the University of Pennsylvania and author of "The Origins of the Urban Crisis"

Competitive edge

Mayor Rendell has instituted a bunch of vital improvements. But competitive standards are getting higher all the time - to provide better service with slimmed-down staffs, to create a private-sector-style esprit de corps among workers, to provide basic services at the lowest feasible costs. Older city governments, laden with barnacles of patronage and encrusted practices, face especially tough challenges.

But they can change. Example: what the municipal experts call "managed competition" - requiring individual city departments to compete against private-sector firms ready to bid on the same work. Mayor Rendell started the practice, but cities like Indianapolis have carried it even further, with dramatic cost savings.

Cities also must learn to think "service first." That means reengineering city operations in all departments. Philadelphia has to be ready to do no less.

- Neal Peirce, who writes about cities for the Washington Post Writers Group

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