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What city do you think presents the greatest challenges for a mayor? Here a few factors I've thought of:
Size - Obviously, running New York City's bureaucracy is much more difficult than running Akron's.
Crime - Always a hot button issue. I would hate to be the mayor of Detroit or Baltimore.
Education - Most big cities have poor education systems, but which would be the toughest to run, factoring in not only poor student achievement, but teacher unions, bureaucracy, etc.
Unions - Unions can cripple a city. Therefore, they wield considerable political power.
Race - I would imagine that a more racially diverse city would be harder to govern.
Regional Cooperation - Some suburbs are engaged in all out warfare against the core city.
Limited Goverment - The city may have a "weak" or "strong" mayor. This might make a difference.
Partisanship - Would governing a one party town make the job easier or more difficult? Not make a difference at all?
Poverty - An impoverished taxbase makes life difficult for a mayor.
Media - The New York Post and the Philadelphia Inquirer might be the most insensitive papers in the nation. If they don't like you, they will make it known. You need a thick skin to be a public figure in either one of those towns.
Accounting for all of these factors, which city do you think would be the greatest headache to govern?
Location: Austin, TX/Chicago, IL/Houston, TX/Washington, DC
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New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, Houston, Phoenix (economically & water situation), Washington DC, & Detroit would possibly be the hardest ones to manage in the country. The bigger they are, the harder it is to handle and more complexity is thrown in.
New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, Houston, Phoenix (economically & water situation), Washington DC, & Detroit would possibly be the hardest ones to manage in the country. The bigger they are, the harder it is to handle and more complexity is thrown in.
I don't think size is as much of a detriment to managing a city as you figure it is. If anything size can be an advantage because bigger size often means a more diverse and stable tax base. Plus a lot of the cities you mention have a stable middle class who can manage their own affairs and maintain a stable social fabric without extensive government assistance. If you take a look at the cities whose institutions are so dysfunctional from top to bottom that you wonder how they'll ever recover, you'll find they are mostly small and medium-sized cities, sometimes in the orbit of larger cities: New Orleans, Camden, East St. Louis (not that St. Louis proper is doing so hot itself), Flint, Gary, Youngstown, Oakland, et cetera. Detroit is really the biggest city that is hopelessly dysfunctional. I bet the mayors of most of these places would love to have the problems of the cities enumerated on your list (besides Detroit) as long as they also had access to those cities' resources.
Any city where the existing political establishment is against big meaningful change that will positively affect the city and an apathetic voting population that has resigned themselves to believe that their city is not capable of doing any better than where it currently is.
Its not the Mayor, its the city that needs to be willing to implement the plan he has for them.
NYC would be tough because of the constant threat of terrorism. And keeping so many different types of people happy.
Chicago would be tough because of unions and the Machine which is entrenched in city politics.
DC would be tough because there's no congressional representation working with you and you're at the whims of the federal gov't.
Detroit would be tough because of the almost non-existent tax base and urban blight. Plus racial politics between the city and suburbs.
N.O. would be tough because there's a lot of post traumatic stress disorder that's under the surface in that city, and with Katrina and the Deepwater spill they must be shell shocked right now.
S.F would be tough because you have to keep a lot of special interest voters satisfied.
Etc. Every city has unique challenges and it's tough to say which is the most challenging. Perhaps N.O. or Detroit because of how far they've already fallen.
Location: The Greatest city on Earth: City of Atlanta Proper
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Hendu
DC would be tough because there's no congressional representation working with you and you're at the whims of the federal gov't.
Very good point.
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