What Does it Take to Run a City?

This been declared the age of cities with cities as places of innovation, experimentation and culture. The state of urban politics is another matter entirely. Most regions continue to view their central city  as a place of disarray, danger, corruption and poor management. "The city is a mess", say many suburbanites  from their polished vantage points in their manicured gated communities. This reflects an ambiguity that goes back to Thomas Jeffreson who called cities both, “corrupters of morals” and “beacons of culture”.

Which is true? And why does it seem to be so difficult to run a city that so many residents dispair in their leaders? 

All the world's problems and no resources

On a cloudless September 11, 2015 Baltimore was once again in the news (NYT, BBC,): The African American Mayor Stephanie Rawlings Blake (SRB), once the youngest city council member ever, who along with State Attorney Marilyn Mosby had become the face of Baltimore in the national and international media, announced that she won't be running in the April 2016 primary local election. Pundits offered various explanations, the most pervasive one being that following "riots in their city mayors are toast," as has been proven before in Detroit and Los Angeles. Even if they, like Rawlings Blake, head up the US Conference of Mayors, are African American with deep community ties and even if the root causes of the urban problems are not local but national (if not international) and even if the national government has left cities starved for resources to deal with these large problems.

Baltimore's Mayor announces that she won't run for office
in the upcoming primary after having been weakened by
urban unrest

That a city being left to deal with a much larger problem isn't a unique to the US was demonstrated the day following the Baltimore announcement across the ocean when the mayor of a much richer and healthier city than Baltimore had to admit another kind of defeat: In Munich, Germany the mayor declared in front of the world's media that one of the richest cities in Europe had come to its limits in the face of 63,000 refugees arriving at the city's rail-station since the beginning of September unless outside help would arrive quickly. Even this city had been outmatched by circumstances far outside its control.

Munich's Mayor Dieter Reiter in front of a graph illsutrating
the refugee influx in his city of Munich, Germany

Corruption and self inflicted wounds

The all too common story is that cities are cesspools of corruption and have created a mess too big to clean up. This line, too, has some veracity: Baltimore's Mayor had come into office after her predecessor, Sheila Dixon, was indicted on felony charges and eventually convicted of misappropriation of funds. After a year with this cloud over her head she was forced to resign at the end of 2009 and banned from office for four years. Dixon shared her entanglement with the law with New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin, Detroits's Kwame Kilpatrick and Washington DC's Marion Barry and a long list of other mayors, a reminder that mayors are sometimes their own worst enemies.


Running a city, a great jumping board for national careers

With three-quarters of American voters having no or little confidence in Congress the "all politics is local", roll-up-your-sleeves variety of mayors are increasingly seen as the ones able to tackle large issues such as climate change, job creation, education or police brutality, in spite of being over-matched, under-funded and occasionally suffering from self inflicted wounds. Indeed, cities were the fertile ground from which sprang the sharing economy and all current trends, including those one would instinctively associate with rural areas such as local farming and healthy food.

Newark's Mayor Ras Baraka follws Coery Booker in
success and charisma

Increasingly the innovation role of cities is recognized and harvested in organized attempts at cross fertilization and rapid exchange of best practices through organizations such as the US Conference of Mayors or the Mayor's Institute run by NEA in partnership with the Architecture Foundation and founded by a true leader among mayors nationally and internationally, Joe Riley of Charleston, SC. Another example comes from ULI with its Rose Center:

The Rose Center for Public Leadership at ULI to empower leaders in the public sector to envision, build, and sustain successful 21st-century communities.In 2014, ULI signed a partnership agreement to jointly guide the oversight and operations of the Rose Center with the National League of Cities, which collectively represent the world’s foremost real estate professionals and the nation’s most distinguished municipal leaders.

Often mayors who wind up first demonstrating progress in their cities and then shaking up the national agenda go on to become national leaders such as Obama's transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx, former mayor of Charlotte, NC or Cory Booker who advanced from being mayor of Newark, NJ to being a Senator in Congress, or Denver's former Mayor Federico Peña, who, like Foxx,

Mayors can demonstrate direct action such as Baltimore
Mayor O'Malley did at this ground-breaking in 2005
(photo: ArchPlan Inc.)

proceeded to become Secretary of Transportation back when Bill Clinton was President. Internationally, London's current quirky mayor Boris Johnson is often cited as a contender for the office of Prime Minister and Curitiba's transformative mayor became governor. Two of the current US presidential contenders were once mayors: Bernie Sanders and Maryland's Martin O'Malley.

“The city, always the human habitat of first resort, has in today’s globalizing world once again become democracy’s best hope,” with mayors the key to that change, writes political theorist Benjamin R. Barber in his book, “If Mayors Ruled the World: Dysfunctional Nations, Rising Cities.” (Politics)

Countless US mayors ascended to become governors of their states, sometimes successfully, sometimes not since the governor's office does not even remotely provide the same immediacy, citizen access and feed-back as city hall offers. Baltimore's mayors that manage this transition successfully include Theodor McKeldin, Donald Schaefer and Martin O'Malley. Across the nation, it was especially Denver's mayor Hickenlooper who continue to help his core city Denver thrive after becoming  governor of Colorado.

Colorado's Governor John Hickenlooper who was initially
Mayor of Denver

With so many strands to the story, what does it take to successfully run a city? Baltimore's recent succession of mayors presents a good overview of policies, personalities and approaches which in many ways reflect larger national and international trends.


Baltimore's recent mayors offer a panoply of policies, successes and failures  

In the face of great economic shifts and a period of massive de-industrialization followed by repositioning in a "knowledge economy", Baltimore presents a microcosm of the confluence of scarce resources, innovative solutions, self-inflicted wounds, and powerful external influences as a quick review of recent mayors exemplifies.

I came to Baltimore during the last few months of William Donald Schaefer’s 15 year tenure as mayor, during which he had orchestrated Baltimore's first "renaissance", which put a stamp on Baltimore in such a way that his reign is more and more embellished and elevated to a degree possibly only through nostalgia and selective memory.

Baltimore's Mayor Donald Schaefer was not shy
when it came to boosting his city like here
at the opening of the National Aquariums addition

 Schaefer personified the traditional path of many mayors: homegrown, local and often myopic as well, he came to the office by going through the ranks from council member to council president, mayor, and eventually governor. He is remembered for many grand brick and mortar projects that changed Baltimore's image from being a declining industrial backwater to a renaissance city with the "best mayor in America." His grand projects include many Baltimore prototypes that cities around the world came to aspire to and copy from: a convention center, a downtown ballpark at Camden Yards (copied across the country), the Baltimore central light rail line, but most importantly the Inner Harbor “festival marketplace” redevelopment, copied from Norfolk to Sydney. But Schaefer was a simple man famous for having a short fuse and his incredible attention to mundane stuff like trash and potholes. On his way to work from his modest row home in Edmondson Village he would fire off the missives and orders regarding what he spotted to be unsatisfactory. That endeared him to the man on the street who regardless of race considered Schaefer "one of us", allowing him to get re-elected three times with over 80% of the votes and to go on to serve several terms as Governor of Maryland.

Still, by the end of his fourth term, the word was that "Willy Don" had focused too much on downtown and not enough on neighborhoods. The time was ripe for an African-American mayor in a city with two-thirds black residents.

Mayor Schmoke in Baltimore's Sand-
town Winchester community for the
ground-breaking of rownhouse rehabs
(photo: ArchPlan)

Kurt Schmoke, an Ivy League educated African-American man, was in many respects the polar opposite of old-style mayor Schaefer. He did pay attention to the neighborhoods, and in particular to West Baltimore's Sandtown-Winchester community where he teamed up with churches, non-profits and the legendary developer James Rouse to turn around the poorest community in the city. Schmoke presided over the demolition of large high rise "projects" that had gained here, as in Chicago and St. Louis, such a reputation as unmanageable centers of crime and grime, that the federal government had created a whole program for their removal (HOPE VI) of which Baltimore became the largest beneficiary. Schmoke was skeptical about Reagan’s "War on Drugs", and early on suggested decriminalization and viewing the drug epidemic as a health and not as a crime issue. But after three terms Schmoke did not run again and the city seemed to be as tired of him as he was of his office, in part because he was seen as too nice to be effective. In spite of all his efforts, neighborhood decline accelerated and so did the flight out of the city and the increase in crime, trends resulting more from national policies than Schmoke's performance.

With that entered Martin O'Malley, a white councilman who benefited from a split of the black vote. O'Malley's mantra was crime and running an efficient government. He flirted with New York's zero tolerance policies and enacted CitiStat, a data-driven approach to overseeing the effectiveness of his agencies with so much fervor that agency heads feared the monthly reporting sessions at the war room that had been established on a mezzanine in City Hall much like an air traffic control tower with screens and monitors. The focus on crime, education and efficiency was reflective of new expectations, slowed the white flight some, and gave O'Malley support in the business community. However, Baltimore's enormous incarceration rates and the alienation between police and African-American Communities planted the seeds for the current eruptions. O'Malley, like Schaefer, went on to become governor and is now running on the Democratic ticket for U.S. President.

Sheila Dixon, who like Schaefer ascended from her position as council president to mayor was yet a quite different force. She ran for a cleaner and greener Baltimore and as the first female and the second elected African-American mayor of this city she enjoyed broad support. People liked her, in part for surrounding herself with competent managers and advisers, in part for being rather unassuming. That changed rapidly when she became embroiled in a gift card scandal and had to resign in disgrace and with a conviction on misappropriation of funds after a plea deal.

Mayor Dixon was followed by then Council President Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, another African-American woman, and a continuation of the previous policy appeared to be ensured. But Blake, whose father was a well liked State Delegate trained as a mathematician set her sight on numbers such as 10,000 additional families to repopulate the city, and reduction of taxes. She ensured passage of the $1 billion dollar school investment fund but also engaged in failed endeavors such as the Baltimore Grand Prix downtown car races which faltered after the second year. Seen as aloof and having poor social skills from the beginning, her fate became sealed with the riots on the day of Freddie Gray's funeral. While Congressman Cummings, and State Senator Pugh and local councilman Mosby joined the clergy in the midst of the uprising appealing for peace, SRB remained at her command center apparently only slowly getting a grip on the scale of the escalating events. Obviously neither the State Governor ("when she finally called me") nor her own verbal gaffes ("giving room for destruction") and clumsy explanations ("it lasted only one day") helped her from from falling into the hole of perceived poor leadership in a time of need from which mayors rarely recover.

Baltimore's mayors of the past showed showmanship, boosterism and big projects, (Schaefer), compassion, attention to neighborhoods and clear legal analysis (Schmoke), can-do metrics oriented efficiency combined with saccharine slogans  such as Baltimore's "Believe" campaign (O'Malley), simple home-strung charm and goals such as "cleaner and greener" (Dixon) and clear citywide goals combined with fumbling initiatives (Rawlings-Blake). Each period has brought about successes and failures, but none has achieved a Baltimore resilient enough to be immune from to the recurring phases of severe backsliding that causes people to doubt its future over and over again.

Like other cities, Baltimore was subjected to austerity, dwindling federal support, and the vagaries of the national economy. Like other US cities, Baltimore made its own contributions, by tripping itself at times such as with Dixon's gift card scandal or the unchecked police use of force leading to Freddie Gray's death at or at least in the hands of the police. Yet even those are mirrored in international trends and events.

Personalities, the form of government or fate?

Not every city is incorporated, not every city has a mayor, and not every mayor is equally strong per the powers which its charter bestows on it. Some U.S. cities are led by administrators or executives, many large urbanized places have no public form of government at all, for example Columbia in Howard County, MD, which would be the State's second largest city if it were incorporated.   But what are the residents of those cities like Baltimore, New York, Detroit, New Orleans, or Denver supposed do about their mayors? Should they hold them accountable for the state of their cities, should they excuse their failings and give them second chances? Should they look for strong

The growing gap of State and Local expenditures and receipts (source)

visionary leaders or for detail-oriented pothole fixers? There may be a time for each, however, it would always be advisable to consider what a planner and friend of mine stated in the context of a similar debate:

 If the issue is poor leadership why are so many cities in the same bind for so many years. NO individual can lead communities that have all been abandoned by Presidents, Senators, Congressmen, Governors and legislatures for the past 60 years. This is a situation where the system overwhelms the individual. It is impossible to get blood from a stone, yet for more than 60 years that is exactly what voters have expected from their mayors. They are mayors, not magicians. (Fred Wilder)

In the light of a number of national crisis all most visible in the nation's cities such as the national housing crisis, the national transportation and infrastructure crisis, the perpetual crisis of race relations, increasing inequality, and the immigration crisis it is absolutely necessary to see local politics in the national and international context.

Cities are the weakest level of American government. Most depend on the property tax – one of the most regressive taxes – as their primary revenue source. Compared to the federal and state governments, American cities have limited spending powers. They cannot run deficits, and their ability to issue and manage debt is relatively restricted.  Moreover, federal and state governments routinely underfund social services, education, infrastructure, public safety, and other services crucial to cities.Tony Favro

It is high time that Congress and the federal government consider a cohesive and strong urban policy that does not leave our nations proud centers of culture, history and innovation to fend or fail by themselves for the future of the entire country rests in its urban centers.


Klaus Philipsen, FAIA

Forms of City government in the US
When Mayors Matter (Georgetown policy paper)
World Mayor Contest
Mayors play the central role in US municipal government (US Conference of Mayors)