When I was covering the Democratic National Convention last July, Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick told me something that I hoped would turn out to be partisan rhetoric.

He said that he wasn’t sure that cities such as his  -- one that was reeling from cuts in federal dollars and a dwindling tax base -- would be able to survive another four years of George W. Bush. To Kilpatrick, Bush was bad for cities.

Looks like he was right.

Last week the Bush administration announced that it would be lopping chunks of money from the $8 billion that the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s community branch receives each year. Among other things, that branch administers the Community Development Block Grant program – a 30-year-old program that many cities depend upon to pay for needs such as housing rehabilitation, water and sewer service, day care and scads of anti-poverty and neighborhood development programs that help their neediest citizens.

But apparently, in keeping with the neoconservative zeal to purge the nation of anything that smacks of New Deal or War on Poverty progressivism, Bush has proposed that the $4.7 billion block grant program be folded into the Commerce Department – a place where it will have to battle for money with programs already favored by that department – and will probably lose.
 
Another HUD program that works to tackle the urban problems of blight, crime and illiteracy in one swoop is Youthbuild USA. That widely lauded national program began in 1990, and it helps jobless and undereducated youths aged 16 to 24 learn job skills by building affordable housing for poor people while working on their GED or high school diploma. They earn a paycheck while restoring the areas where they live, and they are able to reject the street culture by learning to embrace the values of work and education.

But Youthbuild’s $62 million is slated to be meshed into the Labor Department – where it likely will never be seen or heard from again.

Last week, though, Bush administration officials told The Washington Post that, contrary to what some advocates for the poor were saying, the HUD cuts weren’t being made to pay for the president’s tax cuts, but because many of the department’s economic development programs were duplicating other programs.

I’m not buying it.

There are many ways to make programs more efficient – especially programs that have been proven to work – without setting them up for oblivion. What’s happening is that just as Bush has done with Iraq, he is using the cities to apply another wild notion fueled by idealism but short on strategy.

He also seems to be pursuing a path that has been a dismal failure in the past.

Back in the 1980s, former President Ronald Reagan – with the acquiescence of his sole black Cabinet member and HUD Secretary Sam Pierce – sliced HUD’s budget by half. The people who were hurt by it weren’t healed by his supply-side economics cure-all.  Instead, they wound up homeless. It was in the 1980s when the face of homelessness began to change from being that of Skid Row bum to the face of a woman with two children.

That face hasn’t changed.

Yet it seems to me that the Bush administration, with its plans to mesh HUD’s community programs into departments that aren’t geared toward community building, is trying to revisit an old experiment that put many people on the streets – and created many of the problems that cities like Detroit now have to battle with the help of block grants.

Then there’s the irony of it all.

This is an administration that is dying to give money to unproven faith-based initiatives to tackle urban problems where it says the government has failed. Yet it conveniently ignores the fact that Youthbuild, one of its own programs, is working. It accomplishes character and community building in youths, and homes get rebuilt at the same time. Yet the Bush administration didn’t see fit to keep investing in its own success.

I hope that the cities can hold on long enough to outlast this administration. But like Kilpatrick, I’m worried too.

Because when it comes to the cities, Bush’s plans don’t sound like a road to revival, but a path to ruin.