Response to written questions of Senator Riegle 394 Response to written questions of Senator Riegle Reverend Jesse Jackson, founder, Rainbow Coalition, Washington, DC Response to written questions of Senator Specter Response to written questions of Senator Specter 556 557 Federal Home Loan Bank Community Investment Program Reform Anthony Robinson, president, Minority Business Enterprise Legal Defense and Education Fund, Washington, DC Executive summary from study prepared by the Opportunity Funding Strategy 4. Promote and pursue leadership development Recommendations to the Federal Government Steven A. Schroeder, M.D., president, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, THE ECONOMIC CONDITION OF OUR NATION'S CITIES THURSDAY, JANUARY 30, 1992 U.S. SENATE, COMMITTEE ON BANKING, HOUSING, AND URBAN AFFAIRS, Washington, DC. The committee met at 10:15 a.m., in room SD-538 of the Senate Dirksen Office Building, Senator Donald W. Riegle, Jr. (chairman of the committee) presiding. OPENING STATEMENT OF CHAIRMAN DONALD W. RIEGLE, JR. The CHAIRMAN. The committee will come to order. Let me welcome all those in attendance this morning. We meet today to address the economic condition of our Nation's cities. We do that under our mandate as an important part of our committee's responsibility, this being of course the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs. For the past decade, America's urban centers and local communities have suffered from a declining economic base, dwindling fiscal resources, and increasing poverty and unemployment. It's a sad commentary and set of trend lines. It's not universal, but it is the general condition that we find across America. Examples of the current economic strain confronting our cities during this recession are evident wherever we look. Fifty-eight percent of the cities recently surveyed by the U.S. Conference of Mayors reported that the current recession is worse for them than the 1981-82 recession. Most local governments have had to do both tax increases and also reduce spending-and therefore, services-to deal with both the problems facing them of their citizens and to cope with the reduction in revenues in terms of their income that has come about as a result of the recession itself. Comprehensive data is not yet available, but the most recent survey by the U.S. Conference of Mayors indicates that 72 percent of cities have had to raise taxes, 48 percent have cut services, and 42 percent had to both raise taxes and cut services during the past year. Even more disturbing, 59 percent of all cities plan to lay off employees and 74 percent are postponing capital improvements over the course of the year. So the combination, then, of these tax increases and spending cuts have had a perverse effect of creating what's been called fiscal drag on the economy generally during this recession period. Normally, during a recession, we look for economic stimulus and this |