Ending the stalemate: Moving H/CD programs into the future

For more than 2 decades, comprehensive efforts to revitalize cities and declining urban areas have been at a stalemate. The results have been predictable - further blight and decline. Promising efforts to develop a national urban policy in the decade of the 1970s have been abandoned. Two mainstream forces are now at work: 1. the growing reality that central cities and their surrounding urban areas are tied together in newly organized urban regions on both a national and international basis, and 2. there is a substantial new capacity at state and local levels to carry out housing and urban development activities - including those of public agencies, private enterprise, and citizen-based community development entities. This new capacity is increasingly channeled into working partnerships that hold promise of overcoming the obstacles of the past an creating broader constituencies of support for urban revitalization.