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specific buildings or by selling them cheaply to willing

buyers.  They are forged, in a lasting way, only when resi-

dents gradually become better off and make improvements

themselves.  Public funds cannot long sustain neighborhoods

for which there is little private demand and in which there

is little individual investment of money, labor, and love.

It is the struggle to maintain and improve neighborhoods in

which residents have an ownership stake--even in relatively

modest housing--that helps forge a social structure.  In an

effort to provide social structure in inner-city neighbor-

hoods, HUD sought to foster "citizen participation" through

elected community councils, which were to influence how

federal money was spent and to pressure local governments to

make their own contributions.18  Those citizens' councils,

although they may have influenced spending patterns, did not

have the desired effect of generally helping to hold neigh-

borhoods together; rather, they tended to devolve into

insular power bases.19

Given those flaws, it is not surprising that the HUD

vision of demonstration neighborhoods, which massive federal

investment would sustain, did not come to pass.  In addition

to foreclosure on and abandonment of HUD-financed projects,

the gradual exodus of able, former ghetto residents to

better neighborhoods both within the boundaries of cities

and in the suburbs continued.  The overall percentage of

black families living in suburbs rose from 23 percent in

1970 to 32 percent in 1990, while many other black families

moved to relatively affluent in-city neighborhoods.20  For

instance, per capita income in the New York City borough of

Queens is higher for black families than for white.  William

Frey of the Population Studies Center at the University of

Michigan found that throughout the 1980s there was a "wide-

spread pervasiveness of minority increases within suburban

populations.  The vast majority [265] of 314 metropolitan

suburbs increased their minority percentages. . . . Black

suburban gains are also more evident in metropolitan areas

that are recipients of new black migration streams."21

Rebuilding Neighborhoods to Save Cities

HUD assumed that rebuilding neighborhoods would be good

not only for the neighborhoods themselves but for whole

municipalities.  It is tempting to believe that, if a city

is in generally good condition but has some sections that

are dilapidated and occupied by the poor, the city as a