Remember when poor neighborhoods were crowded? Geographer Deborah Popper, writing in the Chicago-based Planning (July): “Population loss in the Northeast, Midwest, and South has meant more open space within cities, often disconcertingly so. Long-term decline has often led to neighborhoods filled with abandoned buildings and overgrown, litter-filled empty lots, where public health hazards and crime flourish….University of Pennsylvania urbanist Witold Rybczynski has argued that we should seek to concentrate the population of seriously declining cities in the most salvageable neighborhoods. Such an approach, he says, would allow better municipal service provision and create a more urban fabric.”
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“We do know that low spending, high achieving schools invest about $5,500 per child,” writes Mary Sue Barrett of the Metropolitan Planning Council, “yet the state’s per-pupil foundation level is stuck at $4,560 for the second year in a row” (“Regional Connection,” Summer).
The war against the Constitution. Michael Kinsley in Slate (July 10): “The eerie non-debate we’re having as vast preparations for battle are made before our eyes is a consequence of a long-running constitutional scandal: the withering away of the requirement of a congressional Declaration of War. Oh, the words are still there, of course, but presidents of both parties flagrantly ignore them–sometimes with fancy arguments that are remarkably unpersuasive, but mainly by now with shrugging indifference. The result is not just a power shift between the branches of government but a general smothering of debate about, or even interest in, the decision to go to war among citizens in general.”
