A GOP Mayor's Soft-Hearted Reforms
Urban innovator
'They're actually the same," Stephen Goldsmith says when asked to assess his successes and failures during his eight years as Indianapolis's mayor. "It depends on the neighborhood you look at," he continues, with the same frankness that has won him a legion of admirers and a small battery of detractors at home and nationwide.
The successes are easy to spot: There is the sparkling city core, where a smart shopping mall, crowned with a glass-arched "Artsgarden," hides behind carefully preserved turn-of-the-century facades, linked underground to restaurants, sports arenas, and cultural attractions. Farther on, a former highway bridge is now a sculpture-dotted pedestrian mall that leads across the cleaned-up White River to a cageless zoo. There are similar if less spectacular successes, too, in what were once havens of "accelerating hopelessness," as Goldsmith describes them. In the nearby United Northwest Area, the Community Development Corp. is building city-aided housing, offering tax breaks and other incentives to businesses that set up shop there and putting pressure on slumlords to rehabilitate their crumbling properties. In Riverside Park, where government funds are leveraged with investor dollars, a handsome recreation center and golf course now attract suburbanites and inner-city residents.
"I never said we don't need federal money, but we could get by with less if they would just send a check and get out of the way," says Goldsmith. He credits his cutting of red tape and privatizing of government services (including the city airport) with financing five property-tax cuts and bringing in new business. "I'm a conservative and I'm an activist," he adds. "Government often does more harm than good, but it doesn't have to." If that sounds like the "compassionate conservatism" of a Republican presidential candidate, Texas Gov. George W. Bush, it is no coincidence. The mayor is a top Bush adviser who helped prep him for the GOP candidate debates. And when he retires from office on December 31, he plans to spend even more time--though not full time--in Austin.
Alliances. Goldsmith, 53, has been involved in faith-based initiatives for 15 years. In 1997, he convened the Front Porch Alliance of religious, community, business, and local government leaders to revitalize the inner city. A year later, after hearing about Boston's Ten Point Coalition while a senior fellow at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, he invited the Rev. Eugene Rivers to meet with local clergy.
Goldsmith recognizes the limits of voluntary action. "They'll get tired; they need some permanent staff," he says of Ten Point's hard-working ministers. That's why he applauds Bush's plan to offer $8 billion in tax breaks for gifts to groups serving the poor.
"Just in terms of pure politics, he probably shouldn't care as much about the poor areas as he does," says spokesman Nick Weber. But as Goldsmith heads to Austin, and perhaps to higher office beyond, he may find that pursuing that concern was a very good investment of his time.
This story appears in the January 3, 2000 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.
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