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Overview
"A Partnership to Conserve America's Communities" was the name President Jimmy Carter gave the first National Urban Policy when he presented it to Congress in March 1978. Based on the personal knowledge of the author, Yvonne Scruggs-Leftwich, who was the executive director of the policy process, and the historical archives she preserved, this book analyzes the actions of Carter, HUD Secretary Patricia Roberts Harris, other Cabinet members, and the professionals leading the process. The focus is on the dynamics of the interactions among federal bureaucrats, public officials, urban advocates, and scholars that characterized the policy's development. Focusing on the process, rather than the substantive policies, Consensus and Compromise outlines the negotiation of power, principles, and priorities necessary to ensure the successful creation of the first National Urban Policy.
Synopsis
Based on the experiences of the author Yvonne Scruggs-Leftwich, who was the executive director of the first National Urban Policy process, and historical archives, this book analyzes the actions of President Carter, HUD Secretary Patricia Roberts Harris, other Cabinet members, and the professionals leading the process. Consensus and Compromise outlines the negotiation of power, principles, and priorities necessary to ensure the successful creation of the first National Urban Policy.
Editorials
Vernon E. Jordan
This book should be read by all with an interest in and passion for Urban America. It is historic, instructive, and inspiring...Alan Curtis
Urban policy makers, scholars, and advocates for the truly disadvantaged had better absorb the wise, candid, and pragmatic insights of Yvonne Scruggs-Leftwich on the evolution of President Carter's national urban policy. The mind boggling insider turf battles among Democrats in the creation of that policy are not unrelated to America's failures at solving the continuing dilemmas of poverty, race, inequality, class warfare by the rich, and loss of "soft power" abroad. The federal government's immoral blunders in New Orleans before and after Hurrican Katrina illustrate the continuing failures of America's military-industrial complex ruling elite to repair and rebuild decaying urban education, security, and other public infrastructure. There has been no coherent urban policy since President Carter. Why?Gwen Moore
In recent years, many of America' major cities have been struggling with the endemic problems of a loss of jobs, violent crime, a lack of social services, and the spread of blight. A strong, strategic national urban policy would be critical in helping communities to address these challenges, but unfortunately, under the current Administration such a policy does not seem to exist.Ramona Hoage Edelin
In 1967, when 85 American cities were in flames and the stability that "business as usual" requires was fundamentally threatened, leaders of the governmental, business, labor, civil rights and faith sectors met to found the National Urban Coalition, and to study cities for the first time. They prayed together and vowed to persist until the root causes of urban unrest were cured.Yet it was not until President Jimmy Carter's Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Patrica Roberts Harris, appointed Dr.
Yvonne (Perry) Scruggs-Leftwich Executive Director of the President's Urban and Regional Policy Group (URPG), and they together produced the first formal national urban policy in 1978, that a coherent approach to the problems of America' cities was articulated.Consensus and Compromise chronicles this centrally important process. It is must reading for all who respect the true domestic history of the United States in the 20th Century.