he rising needs of their citizens. The government reduced the central grant and made it less redistributive. It limited the rates that local authorities could levy, thus hampering local efforts to compensate for the central government cutbacks. And Thatcher created new policymaking bodies to promote economic development, for example removing the power to undertake urban regeneration from local authorities and granting it to private Urban Development Corporations.
The 1980 Housing Act allowed council housing tenants of three years standing to buy their units, a measure that proved one of the most popular of Thatcher s administration. By 1990 one-fifth of the council housing stock had been sold to tenants, though most sales were in suburban areas, and very few in the inner city. Sales patterns followed existing lines of
decade
of Thatcherism
has transformed
British politics in ways that will make it harder to
assist disadvantaged metropolitan areas.
division and thus did not increase racial or income segregation. But reductions in expenditures on maintenance and construction of public housing have reduced its quality, making it less desirable than in the past. In addition, local authorities have often concentrated racial minorities in the worst of the deteriorated housing estates. Although levels of racial segregation do not approach those of the United States, the large dilapidated housing estates located in the British inner city and the urban periphery most closely resemble the isolation and hopelessness found in America s poor urban neighborhoods.
Although a decade of Thatcherism has transformed British politics in ways that will make it harder to assist disadvantaged areas, existing struc tures of policy and politics in Britain nevertheless hampered the government s ability to impose losses on poor places. Because localities can raise revenues only from the property tax, rich Conservative au
thorities joined poor Labour ones in opposing drastic reductions in the central grant. Unlike America) middle-class localities that can make up for with drawn central funds by raising local taxes or fees, al local authorities in Britain still depend heavily o: central government support.
This dynamic led to the repeal of Thatcher s pro posed  poll tax,  opposition to which was central t Thatcher s resignation in the fall of 1990. The poll tai proposed in 1986, would have replaced the local prof erty tax by an equal tax levied on each voter, with th amount to be decided by the local authority. It re placed the local business rate with a uniform rate to h collected by the central government. A far more rt gressive tax on individuals, the poll tax would har sharply limited revenues of poorer localities. The ne
tax aroused enough opposition i Conservative constituencies I provoke a party revolt. Und< Prime Minister John Major tl poll tax has been replaced by council tax, which promises few disadvantages for poor places.
The strong role of the centi government has made it hard for British leaders simply to i nore the problems of the inn city. Throughout the 1980s, tl Conservative government expt imented with a string of polic: aimed at revitalizing cities. / though these programs have ret rected urban policies toward ec nomic redevelopment, they ha kept the problems of cities pron nent on the national agenda, striking contrast to the Unit States.
The Urban Landscape in France
In France, population sortingaf World War ll was even more ct trally directed than in Britain, i
ter an initial emphasis on industrial development,   central planning agency, the Commissariat General Plan, turned to housing. As in Britain, decades of < pression and war had left a dilapidated and mea housing stock, and the French government looked the fastest and cheapest means possible to address problem. In the Parisian metropolitan area, this me massive high-rise housing projects on new sites outs the city.
HLM housing, as the public housing program called, came to serve 14 percent of the French p l lation, far less than in Britain, though much more ti in the United States. The suburban housing were conceived as workers  lodgings, located f (and often subsidized by) industries in the Parl-suburbs. As in Britain, rules governing access to pu housing initially worked against immigrant racia norities. In fact, HLM housing tended to serve middle and lower-middle classes rather than the '
196
poor, who lived in private rental housing in city slums.
By the 1970s, however, HLM housing had been opened to immigrant racial minorities, and the proportion of immigrants in HLM housing reached 30 percent in some estates. At the same time, national programs to promote homeownership prompted the exodus of many middle-class families from HLM housing.
During the 1980s, the French Socialists, with political aims and a constituency far different from that of Thatcher, also introduced sweeping changes in central-local relations. Their aim was to produce more local democracy and enhance local public powers.
Local government in France, as in the United States, is fragmented into many small units. Although the central government has the formal authority to reduce the number of units, in practice the penetration of central power by local authorities (who are allowed to hold multiple offices simultaneously) has blocked territorial rationalization. The central government exercised power over this fragmented political terrain through the departmental prefect, whose approval was necessary for most local actions.
Through a new system of block grants and the devolution of some social responsibilities to lower levels of government, the Socialists gave localities much more autonomy in urban planning and in allocating spending. Not surprisingly, however, well-positioned localities used their new autonomy to attract investment and enrich the local tax base, while poorer localities had to levy higher taxes and cut back on services. And an overall decline in public spending in France during the 1980s exacerbated these differences.
The myriad development decisions of local governments replaced the strong central hand that once allocated economic activities and populations among different regions and within metropolitan areas. And the central government s postwar power of siting social housing was sharply curtailed, while the local power to reject such housing, or to resist undesirable tenants, grew considerably. The least powerful and least well-off localities ended up with more social housing.
In response, the Socialists passed a series of laws aimed at reversing the new inequalities. One law transfers resources from rich localities to poorer ones. Another obliges localities to pay a penalty if they refuse to accept a certain percentage of social housing for the poor. A third seeks to remedy the housing problems of the extremely poor by helping them pay back-rent. Finally, the central government enacted a new minimum income financed by the central government for those not covered by existing social assistance. The new  Revenue Minimum d Insertion seeks, as its name implies, to insert the poor into French society by providing financial resources in exchange for which recipients seek work or training.
Many of the inequalities that the French government has sought to combat are closely linked to fears of developing American-style ghettos. In contrast to the short-lived shock experienced in the United States after the Los Angeles riots last year, the disturbances that have sporadically rocked French suburban housing projects since 1981 have provoked a nationa
43. Race and Urban Poverty
soul-searching about French identity. Government action has been aimed at preventing the consolidation of separate ethnic and racial communities.
The Socialist government has sought to combine the benefits of decentralization greater local democracy, freeing of local economic initiative, and the reduction of central government responsibility for administering austerity with a commitment to equalizing the territorial distribution of economic resources. By most accounts, the growth in the number of elected officials has not invigorated local democracy; it has merely increased the power of local notables. As such it introduces a dynamic into French politics familiar to Americans: representatives of localities with different resources may interpret not only the local interest but also the national interest quite differently. The changes introduced by decentralization have created political forces that may challenge equalization efforts now that a conservative political coalition has replaced the Socialists.
Building National Community
Concentrated, racially identified poverty presents a formidable challenge for liberal democratic regimes. The existence of such sharp racial and economic divisions has fostered a kind of  defensive localism  that corrodes any notion of a national community. The central challenge facing political leaders who wish to build national community in racially and ethnically diverse societies is to recreate a sense of common fate. To do that, they must understand how public policies and political institutions are contributing to the racially identified divisions that now form the subtext of politics across the West. Governments cannot erase social differences, but they can use policy to reduce the economic and political importance of such divisions.
The central task for policy is to reconnect the poor to the sources of vitality in the economy. Politically feasible starting points would fold initiatives for the poor into policies that also address the concerns of other sectors of society. Political leaders and policymakers must look for those points of connection and bear them in mind when making policy. That task is politically easier in the more centralized context o European politics, although it may be more culturally difficult in these once racially homogenous nations. In the United States, where long experience with ethnic diversity sits uneasily with a history of racial exclusion and a celebration of political localism, the pohtica task is difficult indeed. But there are some possible points of departure, which include: dissatisfaction with the environmental consequences of deconcentrated patterns of metropolitan development, emerg-ng strains in suburban public budgets, the growing needs of employers for better-educated entry-level workers, and the widely felt problems of combmmg work and family. The political structures and policies that have helped create concentrated racial pov ty will not be easily or comprehensively
But federal and state political leaders do have power to initiate changes that will provide a foundation for asserting a broader collective interest m American political life.
1
Article 44
Ethnic conflict
Andrew Bell-Fialkoff
Andrew Bell-Fialkoff, a former associate of the Center for the Study of Small States at Boston University, is completing his Ph.D. in ethnic conflict studies.
Lat