Game / Outside Game David Rusk's Book,

¶ … Game / Outside Game David Rusk's book, Inside Game / Outside Game: Winning Strategies for Saving Urban America is an insightful and well-researched addition to the current understanding of urban management and public administration. In his book, Rusk argues convincingly that improvement in inner city neighborhoods can only come from a coordinated effort that includes regional approaches to reducing suburban growth, the concentration of poverty, and financial differences. However, Rusk's collaborative strategies for improving urban America face some important bureaucratic challenges described within Morgan and England's text, Managing Urban America.

In Inside Game / Outside Game, Rusk argues for reform of metropolitan regions based on the interrelationship between urban management and management of other, outside concerns, like taxation, suburban growth, and housing practices. Rusk argues that revitalization of neighborhoods, affordable housing, preservation of open space and fiscal policy reform are closely related. As such, changes in factors like taxation or housing practices can have a profound effect in urban neighborhoods. In Rusk's book, he describes the relationship of the inside and outside games in urban planning.

The term inside game refers to urban management, while outside game refers public administration and management outside the city core, including suburban management. Rusk suggests that government anti-poverty initiatives have largely been unsuccessful because they approach the problem of the inner city from the inside out, and that playing the "inside game" is ultimately a losing approach. Similarly, he suggests that the problems of the poorest of America's cities cannot be righted either by spending money on community development, or simply improving efficiency.

David Rusk is clearly qualified to write a book on urban management and public administration. He has previously written the influential Cities without Suburbs, and has a long history and experience in public administration. Rusk has served as a mayor of Albuquerque, an advisor to city governments, a neighborhood organizer, and as a state representative in New Mexico. The key thesis of Rusk's book is that urban revitalization is closely linked to the effective management of suburban growth, reform of taxation, and fair share housing practices.

Rusk notes that there is a high correlation between a city's ability to incorporate new suburban growth with the same city's ability to avoid inner city poverty, as well as maintain good economic growth and sound fiscal health. To Rusk, the problems that concern planners of urban regions are linked closely to solutions that can be found outside the urban area, and thus require coalitions and comprehensive solutions.

Ultimately, Rusk argues that a city with a small tax base, a poor population, and expensive public services cannot compete with the suburbs without outside interventions. There are a number of key benefits to controlling the inside game, or urban development. Overall, Rusk suggests that the efforts of a number of Community Development programs have been largely unsuccessful.

These attempts effectively stymied by a number of factors, including racial bias, isolation, poverty among urban minorities, government policies that help increase suburban sprawl, and the declining fiscal health of city governments faced with revitalizing the inner city core. Rusk then describes the outside game, including efforts to share tax bases, coordinate land use on a regional basis, or create comprehensive and affordable housing programs.

He uses a number of examples, from regions as diverse as Montgomery County, MD, Minneapolis, MN, and Portland, OR, to demonstrate the success of such initiatives is widespread. Rusk notes that these policies are highly interconnected. In the case of Portland, the coordination of land use planning on a regional basis had a profound impact on reducing trends to concentrate poverty in urban areas. Further, tax base sharing in Minneapolis had a strong impact on reducing suburban sprawl and fiscal inequality.

Overall, the policies of the outside game noted by Rusk tend to have a wide variety of benefits on the inside game, as well. An important part of Rusk's book is contained in the final section, where he discusses organizations and groups that must be built in order to check the decline of the inside game. He notes that these coalitions should attempt to replicate models seen in metropolitan areas that have been successful in dealing with many of the problems inherent with the inner city.

Further, Rusk notes that building coalitions at state legislative levels is also important. In addition, Rusk suggests that federal housing policies can play a key role in stemming the decline of inner cities. One of the most valuable contributions of Rusk's book is his use of census statistics to illustrate many of his concepts. This adds a great deal of credence to his theories, and is a profound addition to the anecdotal evidence. Despite this, many of his statistical claims are based on correlational, rather than causational, data.

In addition to his scholarly focus on the presentation of data and theory, Rusk is also careful to focus his book closely on personal and human costs of urban malaise. Rusk writes, "successful political reform movements are not about data. They are about real people in real situations: inspired legislators, courageous city and county officials, determined citizen activists.

I hope that the success stories told here will inspire some readers to step forward in their own communities." Rusk's book can make an important contribution to public policy discussions in city planning. The concepts of affordable housing programs, tax bases, and coordinating land use are germane to almost all cities in the United States today. Further, the challenge of improving the quality of life in inner cities is also a widespread problem.

Rusk's focus on the connectedness of urban revitalization and the management of suburban growth, tax reform, and fair share housing practices is thus widely applicable. His focus on building coalitions is also germane to discussions of poverty in urban areas, affordability of housing, planning of transportation and sustaining the environment. Rusk's arguments relate closely to a number of themes that are found in the classic text Managing Urban America, written originally in 1979 by David R. Morgan and Robert E. England.

Morgan and England argue that America's cities are falling into decline. They quote Cleveland mayor Michael White, who said, "cities are becoming a codename for crumbling neighborhoods." large part of this decline in urban neighborhoods, note the authors, comes from declines in difficulties in obtaining federal grants, and massive overregulation in administration. Shrinking federal funding for cities has also played a key role in the decline of cities, note the authors. For example, federal aid dropped 55% from 1980 and 1987. Importantly, the authors note that tax bases in cities are shrinking.

At the same time, inner city poverty is high and employment is limited. This decreased tax base in cities relates closely to the concepts discussed by Rusk in Inside Game / Outside Game. Rusk argues that changes in taxation in the "outside game" outside of the urban centers is a key component in improving and reforming metropolitan regions. Many of the administrative and bureaucratic problems in city governments noted by Morgan and England may impact the types of changes suggested by Rusk. Discouragingly,.