This document contains the proceedings of a conference dealing with the issues that face U.S. cities today. Convened in October of 1979, the conference was sponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia. The document contains addresses and comments by six authorities on the current fiscal situation of large cities. The presentation…

Assesses, using the Urban Development Action Grant as a case study, why the evaluation of American urban economic initiatives has declined. The authors conclude that this decline occurred because of such evaluation's perceived lack of utility for policymakers and ineffectiveness in actually informing either policy or practice. The problems…

Evaluates the performance, between 1980 and 1990, of 12 supposedly revitalized cities on the basis of objective indicators of the economic well-being of their residents and compares the cities' performances to those of other cities that were equally distressed in 1980. The evaluation, with three exceptions, reveals no evidence of revitalization.…

States must ensure that all citizens, regardless of race, have real opportunities to gain the education and skills needed to achieve the American Dream. If state policies, especially economic policies, fail to acknowledge the growing numbers of poor Black undereducated and unskilled urban youth, that dream of equal opportunity will continue to be…