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One of the leading Republicans who truly sought to alleviate poverty and inner city blight, not to mention a host of other societal ills, died yesterday at the age of 73:

Mr. Kemp won his House seat in 1970 because of his celebrity as an all-star quarterback for the Buffalo Bills, twice champions of the American Football League. He connected his concern for minorities with his respect for his black teammates, especially the linemen who had protected him from pass rushers.

Mr. Kemp was secretary of housing and urban development under the first President George Bush and the Republican vice-presidential nominee in 1996.

His biggest task was cleaning up the corruption and favoritism that had marked the housing department during the Reagan administration. Again he was a bundle of energy. He met black leaders, visited homeless shelters and presided over the destruction of failed housing projects like Cabrini-Green in Chicago. He also offered proposals like tax preferences for inner-city "enterprise zones" and urged that public housing tenants be enabled to buy their homes. Most of these ideas went nowhere. One successful measure was the Affordable Housing Act, a block grant program that has spent about $1.5 billion a year since 1992.

It does make you wonder, though, why most of his novel ideas to reduce poverty went nowhere. This 1994 New York Times Magazine article by Nicholas Lemann (managing editor of The Washington Monthly) points out that Kemp's Empowerment Zone ideas never took hold with those who were espousing them in the first place:

Empowerment Zones get remarkably lukewarm endorsements from many of the very people who dreamed them up. Here are a few voices from around the Administration: "The evaluations don't provide an encouraging picture." "It was a given." "There are a lot of problems with it." On Capitol Hill, the committee chairmen who were responsible for Empowerment Zones, Representative Dan Rostenkowski of the House Ways and Means Committee and Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of the Senate Finance Committee, are both known to be nonbelievers. The person probably most responsible for the passage of Empowerment Zones is Representative Charles B. Rangel of New York. What does he think? "I rejected the whole concept under Reagan. But people came to me and said, 'How can it hurt?' So I just said, 'What the hell.' But when it started looking like the urban policy for the nation, it was obviously inadequate."

It could be that if you lift up the boat of those stuck in the inner city, they just move out:

The predictions being made for Empowerment Zones' ability to perform their job of revitalizing distressed areas are striking in their modesty. "It depends on your expectations," says Andrew M. Cuomo, an Assistant Secretary at the Department of Housing and Urban Development and one of the program's architects. "If you expect to see Harlem as gentrified and mixed-income, it's not going to happen. If you look at people who moved out, it can be a success." Paul R. Dimond, the White House staff member most involved in planning Empowerment Zones, strikes a similar note: "I'm not saying it's going to succeed 100 percent. . . . If they're successful, lots of people will move out."

It's also interesting to note how right and wrong Andrew Cuomo was about Harlem. Fifteen years after he said Harlem couldn't be gentrified, the real estate boom of the past 10 years has led to many wealthy whites moving in (oftentimes with the corresponding racial stress that accompanies gentrification). But did that lead to many blacks moving out? Probably not...

Or it could be that the issue is really one of systemic paralysis:

Someone who was able to look at this situation afresh -- a modern-day de Tocqueville -- might well ask, Why is the Government addressing a problem of this severity with a solution that its own officials don't really seem to believe in? The answer transcends the Clinton Administration. Instead, it has to do with the strange way American society outside the ghettos deals with the problems inside. For three decades, Administration after Administration has pondered the ghettos and then settled on the idea of trying to revitalize them economically -- even though there is almost no evidence that this can work. Nearly every attempt to revitalize the ghettos has been billed as a dramatic departure from the wrongheaded Government programs of the past -- even though many of the wrongheaded programs of the past tried to do exactly the same thing. The old cliche about ghetto life is that it's "a cycle of despair." Actually it's ghetto policy making that's a cycle of despair: The leadership class repeatedly turns to policies that sound appealing but are doomed to fail -- and then their failure practically guarantees that the country won't face the issue head on.

Go look at areas of Brooklyn which are still quite bleak: Brownsville, Ridgewood, Bushwick. This is still America...falling down insfrastructure, crappy public schools, crime...It's quite sad, actually. And although Jack Kemp's heart was in the right place, perhaps his colleagues in Congress never had the stomach to properly tackle the the problem. Or the American public just doesn't give a damn about inner-city poverty:

Programs to make daily life in the ghettos decent and to put inner-city residents on the track to something better are problematic for Washington. Voters are absolutely certain that social services cost a lot and don't work, so political support for them is hard to come by. Meanwhile, there is considerable evidence that out in the ghettos, people are finding ways to deliver social services, especially housing and day care, effectively. Everybody involved in antipoverty work knows this, which is the reason that, on the ground, community efforts focus primarily on housing, safety, education and job training -- and the reason that Washington tries regularly to sneak more financing for these social services into legislation. What the people who know won't do, at the moment, is state these goals directly. They fear that public hostility to Government social-service programs is too strong. It's a tragedy. What is gained in the short run by making a promise that sounds more appealing -- economic development -- is far outweighed by what is lost in the long run when the dream doesn't come true.

This is the America that we live in today, and although Jack Kemp tried to make it a better place through his empowerment zones, ultimately most Americans couldn't care less. Let's hope that our first Community Organizer President - Barack Obama - can change the way we look at this part of America and challenge us to come up with some new, fresh ideas to help reduce the poverty and suffering endured by this "other" class. Jack Kemp devoted his career to trying...we should too.

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