Proclaiming a Crisis Past

On the radio last week, President Nixon made the surprising declaration that in urban America "the hour of crisis has passed." With that assessment, he brushed aside a decade or more of contentions that the nation's great cities were besieged, impoverished and in danger of decay. To support his official optimism, Nixon cited some cheery generalizations: civil disorders have declined; crime rates have fallen in more than half the major cities; finances have improved; the air is getting cleaner. Every one of those assertions is either partially true or partially misleading.

Racial tensions are not at the flare point of the mid-1960s, yet friction is rarely far from the surface, particularly in Detroit, Chicago, Cleveland and Newark. Crimes against property have been leveling, but violent crimes against people continue to stalk the urban areas. Many cities are doing better financially than in recent years, but the nation's five biggest--New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Detroit --are either in the red or otherwise financially troubled.

To be sure, the term "crisis" has been bandied about all too broadly in discussing urban ills. Some cities, including San Francisco, Minneapolis, Atlanta, Denver and Portland, have not really been in a crisis. But of those that were--mostly in the Northeast and Midwest -- few if any are really any more livable now than when Nixon assumed office. The President could justly claim that the cities at least have not fallen apart and that there are significant improvements here and there, with a true test still ahead as the effects of Nixon's budget and revenue sharing work themselves out. But the President's exaggerated, crisis-ending rhetoric was inevitably reminiscent of Vermont Senator George Aiken's celebrated 1966 advice on how the U.S. could disengage from Viet Nam: declare the war won and pull out.

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