Empowerment Zones: A Background
Urban arenas have become theaters where major conflicts around class, race, and ethnicity are performed. Haymes (1995) has argued that reclaiming cities through gentrification provides an urban arena for disenfranchising African Americans and their cultural contributions and ownership of the city. Haymes' cultural evaluation suggests "pedagogy of place" for Black urban struggle as one way for urban restructuring. On the other hand, Krumholz and Clavel, (1994) while recognizing class, race and ethnicity as factors, present a highly rational plan for "reinventing cities."
Empowerment Zones Program: An Introduction
President Bill Clinton instituted when he declared battered pieces of urban America as empowerment zones and launched a $3.5-billion experiment, the largest in three decades, to rebuild inner cities and rural areas.
In the five years since the money started flowing in January of 1995, the urban empowerment zones claim they have lured billions of dollars in new investment and thousands of new jobs to places like the South Bronx, Mexican Town in Detroit and Cabbagetown in Atlanta. (Dixon, 1A).
The Empowerment Zones (EZ) program was aimed to support comprehensive planning and investment intended for the economic, physical and social development of the most needy urban and rural areas in the United States. Under the initial round of funding announced in December 1994, 71 urban sites received EZ designation.1 The major share of the federal funding went to the six sites selected as Empowerment Zones (EZs). Even though significant autonomy has been afforded to these sites concerning the selection of particular strategies and activities to follow, each funded community's efforts at zone transformation were expected to reflect four key principles:
- Economic opportunity
- Community-based partnerships
- Sustainable community development, and
- A strategic vision for change.
In 1996, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development selected a team led by Abt Associates to conduct an Interim Assessment of the first round of urban EZ sites............
