D. Creating Safe, Healthy, and Sustainable Communities

The Administration is committed to encouraging development strategies that foster truly sustainable communities. This commitment is exemplified by the President's Council on Sustainable Development, which works within the Federal Government and with public and private partners to explore paths to sustainability.

Clean up and redevelop brownfields. The Brownfields National Partnership brings together the resources of 15 Federal agencies to clean up and redevelop contaminated brownfields. The Partnership represents a $300 million Federal investment over 2 years in mostly urban land. It is expected to leverage between $5 billion and $28 billion in private investment, support up to 196,000 jobs, and protect up to 34,000 acres of undeveloped greenfield areas outside of cities.

Under the proposed FY 1999 extension of the President's Brownfields Initiative, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) would receive $91 million to make grants to approximately 100 communities for site assessment and redevelopment planning, as well as for capitalizing revolving loan funds to finance cleanup efforts at the local level.

HUD resources will, in turn, focus on stimulating reinvestment by restoring brownfields sites. The FY 1999 budget proposes to double funding for the Brownfields Redevelopment Program to $50 million, leveraging $200 million in loans and loan guarantees and helping to generate 280,000 jobs precisely where employment opportunities are most urgently needed.

The U.S. Department of Transportation has instituted a new policy giving States, localities, and transit agencies the flexibility to participate in transportation projects that include the careful reuse of brownfield sites. This represents a major shift in prior policy, which called for avoiding contaminated sites wherever possible.

Finally, the Administration proposal for a brownfields tax incentive was signed into law by President Clinton in 1997. It allows cleanup costs to be expensed in the years those costs are incurred, rather than capitalized into the cost of the property. This $1.6 billion incentive is expected to leverage $6 billion in private sector cleanup of 11,000 brownfields sites over the next three years.

Support Sustainable Development. EPA's Sustainable Development Challenge Grants are one catalyst for community-based projects that recognize the essential link between environmental quality and economic prosperity. These grants provide seed money for a wide array of projects -- such as an ecological park in an inner-city neighborhood in Omaha and a building materials exchange for New Orleans -- that protect the environment while facilitating economic growth.

New Assets from Old Cloth -- The Brownfields Showcase Communities

The 16 Brownfields Showcase Communities designated earlier this year to share $28 million in coordinated Federal assistance understand that even the most despised eyesores can be important community assets. "By working to transform brownfields into hubs of economic activity, we will create new jobs, new revenue, and new opportunity," Vice President Al Gore said in naming the Showcase Communities.

Brownfields redevelopment activities link the unique past, present concerns, and future aspirations of the Showcase Communities. For example:

The job-poor and economically isolated community of East Palo Alto in California's prosperous Silicon Valley region is cleaning up and redeveloping its brownfields as part of a strategic effort to broaden its economic base.
Kansas City, Missouri, and Kansas City, Kansas, are working together to revitalize the bi-state Central Industrial District, once famous for its vast stockyards and as a rail and manufacturing center.
Southeast Florida's Eastward Ho! Brownfields Partnership, a coalition of public, private, and nonprofit entities, is one arm of a larger strategic plan to direct future growth toward the region's already urbanized areas and away from the threatened Everglades.

The influx of new immigrants is felt most strongly in America's cities, particularly the traditional ports of entry -- Boston, Chicago, New York, and San Francisco -- and the newer "gateway" cities of the South and West. Today's immigrants benefit our economy and our Nation as clearly as they did a century ago.⁴²

President Clinton is working to help cities minimize the pressures caused by the current surge of immigration and quickly tap the knowledge, industry, and creativity that immigrants bring to their adopted land.

President Clinton made a commitment to fix several provisions in the welfare reform law that had nothing to do with moving people from welfare to work. In 1997, the President fought for and ultimately was successful in ensuring that the Balanced Budget Act protects the most vulnerable. The Act protects immigrants who become disabled and those currently receiving benefits. The Act restored $11.5 billion in SSI and Medicaid benefits for legal immigrants. The new law protects those immigrants now receiving assistance, ensuring that they will not be turned out of their apartments or nursing homes or otherwise left destitute. And for immigrants already here but not receiving benefits, the Act does not change the rules retroactively. Immigrants in the country as of August 22, 1996, but not receiving benefits at that time, who subsequently become disabled will also be fully eligible for SSI and Medicaid benefits.

The Administration is also aiding cities' efforts to acclimate and educate recent immigrants by requesting increased funding for Bilingual Education Professional Development, which gives teachers the skills they need to help their students learn English; for Adult Education to expand services and improve instruction in English as a Second Language; for programs that encourage low-income students to complete high school and attend college; and for a variety of other education and vocational training programs.

Although crime is mainly a local and State responsibility, the last 5 years show that the Federal Government can play an important role in reducing crime. The Administration's aggressive approach to empowering cities' anticrime efforts reflects a thoughtful balance between law enforcement and crime prevention, with special attention to the challenge of juvenile crime and violence.

The cornerstone of the President's agenda for fighting urban crime is the Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) program, putting 100,000 police officers on the streets of our cities and towns, and employing proven, effective community policing strategies that involve citizens in partnership with law enforcement authorities. This year the Administration is extending this approach through a Community Prosecutors Initiative that will provide competitive grants for local prosecutors' offices to work directly with neighborhood residents, forge strategic partnerships with police and other agencies to solve local crime problems, and shift their emphasis from simply processing cases to preventing crimes from occurring in the first place.

Boston Collaboration Cuts Youth Crime

By the early 1990s, Boston police had begun to realize that simply "getting tough" wasn't enough to curb youth violence. "We finally saw that we couldn't simply arrest our way out of the escalating bloodshed," according to police commissioner Paul F. Evans. Instead, a more innovative, community-wide response emerged, featuring innovative partnerships among police, those who work directly with at-risk youth -- such as the Reverend Eugene Rivers, founder of Boston's nationally known, faith-based Ten Point Coalition -- and Harvard researchers.

With backing from the Department of Justice and the Treasury Department's Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF), Boston's efforts focused first on youth gangs -- and gun buying by their most aggressive members, who accounted for three-fourths of Boston's juvenile homicides. School principals and social workers meet regularly with police to share information. And local nonprofit groups and churches work to provide neighborhood youth with positive alternatives to crime and gangs.

Results have been immediate and dramatic. Boston's crime rate has tumbled -- the murder rate fell 27 percent to its lowest point since 1961, and the city went for more than 2 years without a single youth homicide. Treasury's Youth Crime Gun Interdiction Initiative is helping 16 other cities match Boston's success, providing local law enforcement with the tools they need to go after gun dealers who push guns to children.

The Administration's anti-crime agenda also calls for expanding programs to combat drug abuse through treatment and prevention programs totaling $2.4 billion in FY 1999. These include the innovative Drug Courts Initiative and the Safe and Drug-Free Schools and Communities Program, which helps nearly every school district in America conduct anti-drug and anti-violence programs and offers competitive grants to high-need areas with proven programs.

HUD empowers public housing authorities (PHAs) and their local partners with tools to target crime and drugs in public housing. Operation Safe Home brings together residents, managers, and various Federal and local law enforcement agencies to rid public housing communities of crime. President Clinton's "One Strike and You're Out" initiative encourages public housing authorities to evict those who abuse the privilege of living in public housing by committing crimes, peddling drugs, or preying on their neighbors. Public and Indian Housing Drug Elimination Program grants fund a wide range of security improvements and crime control activities in public housing developments, as well as community-based drug prevention, intervention, and treatment programs.

While there are hopeful trends in basic public health indicators such as life expectancy and infant mortality for the Nation as a whole, there are troubling disparities in public heath: central city residents are less healthy than other Americans and they are less likely to have health insurance. The Clinton-Gore Administration is committed to helping cities close this health gap.

Ten million American children lack health insurance. The new Children's Health Insurance Program should help reduce this number significantly over the next 5 years, as it sends $24 billion to the States to expand health insurance coverage for uninsured low-income children.

The President's budget includes $80 million for health education, prevention, and treatment services for minority populations. Under this proposal, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) would launch a $30 million demonstration program through which selected communities would develop innovative and effective approaches to reduce racial and ethnic disparities in health status -- for example, in diabetes, heart disease, and child and adult immunizations. Another $50 million would go to various public health programs that serve mostly minority and low-income populations.