Posts Tagged ‘Freakonomics’

Reinvent Trenton is published to help policy makers and voters think about Trenton’s issues and how to resolve them.  The site introduces new ideas, it presents data and it offers what I hope are constructive plans to revitalize the city.    Quite a bit of what you read on the site comes straight out of business, economics and public policy reading that I’ve done.  The idea is to interpret academic ideas and apply their central concepts to our situation here in the River City. Read the rest of this entry »

One of, if the not the biggest thing holding back revitalization in American cities is crime.

The facts speak for themselves – cities with high crime rates generally have poor growth rates. Cities that have somehow improved their crime rate do much better.

New York and Washington, DC are great examples of cities that have aggressively attacked their crime issues and have unleashed unprecedented economic growth. Washington used to be the most dangerous city in America and New York was supposed to be leading the country into chaos.

Looking just at New Jersey, two cities, New Brunswick and Newark are overcoming their crime issues and generating positive population growth. Meanwhile, Asbury Park, Trenton and Camden continue to scare their populations away.

Lot’s of people have lots of things to say about crime. The police say they do all they can and blame the courts for a revolving door justice system or the public for not cooperating. Children’s advocates blame lack of after-school programs. Civil rights leaders blame racism. Parents blame everybody and Bill Cosby blames parents.

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