Bob Kolasky is the managing editor of IntellectualCapital.com. His e-mail address is bob@voxcap.com

It was little surprise that Vice President Al Gore chose New York City to kick off his three-week "prosperity and progress" tour last week. Gore hopes that by attaching himself with this tour to the economic good times in much of the country, he will be able to regain momentum for his floundering presidential campaign. What better place to start than the Big Apple.

The United States' leading urban center is, by most accounts, in the midst of a renaissance. Crime has dropped 55% since 1990, the flourishing high-tech industry has brought thousands of new jobs to the city, the citywide unemployment rate fell to 5.8% in April, Times Square has been gentrified, and long-time New Yorkers frequently remark about how clean the city streets are. In many ways, New York is the embodiment of progress and prosperity -- and it mimics nationwide trends that find that the quality of life in urban centers has risen demonstrably in the 1990s.

Giuliani helped the renaissance in NYC

Both Democrat and Republican politicians, from Gore to New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, celebrate urban renewal as cities reap the benefits of more jobs, lower crime rates, smaller welfare rolls and more vibrant economic centers. Whereas a decade ago commentators warned of urban wastelands, today a real sense of optimism has overtaken America's big cities.

Myron Magnet, the editor of The City Journal, as well as the newly published The Millennial City, writes in the anthology that "in the nineties urban America almost miraculously came back to life, with breathtaking speed. From New York to Los Angeles, from San Diego to Milwaukee, cities vigorously rebounded."

The effects of the new economy

Still, all is not perfect in urban America. "The State of the Cities 2000," (PDF File) a report released in mid-June by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), paints a decidedly mixed picture of life in major metropolitan areas. It identifies four trends that are, for better or worse, fundamentally changing city life.

• The first of the trends, or "megaforces" as the HUD report refers to them, deserves the most credit for improving quality of life in big cities: the swell of high-tech industry in metropolitan areas, and the resulting economic growth. According to the HUD report, from 1992 to 1997 (the last year data were available), high-tech jobs in cities increased 27%. This is having a positive effect on all aspects of urban employment. The report also found that since 1992, wages of city employees have grown by 4.8%; in the same time, unemployment rates have fallen by 3.7% (to 4.8%), and urban household income has been consistently on the rise.

  The economic signs, however, are not all positive. The poverty rate in central cities remains high: 18.5%, which is down only 1% since 1992. And unemployment among certain sectors of the population -- particularly minority youth, who have an unemployment rate of 22% -- is still staggering.

• The second "megaforce" identified by HUD is directly related to the economic boomlet being caused by the new economy. As a result of the soaring sector, affordable housing in urban areas is becoming increasingly rare. "The stronger the economy, the stronger the upward pressure on rents," says HUD Secretary Andrew Cuomo. "Even some of America's strongest regions for business are being 'priced out' of housing by their success."

  This problem is exacerbated in cities that have reaped the largest benefit from the high-tech industry. Housing in cities such as New York, Boston and the San Francisco Bay Area has reached near-crisis levels. The California Association of Realtors reports that the median housing price was 25% higher in San Francisco in the first quarter of 2000 than in the first quarter of 1999.

  Overall, HUD finds that from 1997 to 1999, urban home prices rose at more than twice the rate of general inflation, and rent increases surpassed inflation for all three years for an overall 10% increase.

  Predictably, this has had disastrous effects on the urban poor. HUD has found that 5.4 million low-income families pay more than half their income for housing or live in "severely inadequate" housing. And a survey taken by the U.S. Conference on Mayors found that 46% of cities that responded were in the midst of serious or very serious shortages for low- and moderate-income households.

Changing demographics, and geography

• While cities struggle with the dearth of affordable housing, a third trend could worsen the problem. The metropolitan population is expected to grow from 275 million in 2000 to 350 million in 2030. Half this growth is projected to be new immigrants and their children.

  Underneath this general data are some specific areas to watch. By 2030, seniors will comprise 20% of the population of the United States, and a disproportionate number of seniors will reside in central cities.

  Can our cities confront racial issues?

  Cities also will become more diverse: Already, in 1998, 46.9% of central-city residents are minorities. With the continued surge in immigration, that percentage will just grow higher, meaning that urban areas will continue to confront issues related to the relationships between Latino, Caucasians, Asian Americans and African Americans, which have caused trouble in urban areas throughout the last century.

  As the HUD study notes: "[F]or centuries, two separate conversations took place -- one about race and another about ethnicity. ... The new demography is changing all that. The new wave of immigrants includes individuals of diverse races and ethnicities who don't fit neatly into the old racial and ethnic molds."

• The final "megaforce," identified by the report is the "new force of decentralization." In laymen's terms, that means the old paradigm of suburbs built to complement central cities -- largely for recreational and housing purposes -- has disappeared. Suburbs and central cities now form metropolitan "regions," where the central city is not necessarily the dominant economic driver. HUD found that in 1997, 57% of metropolitan area jobs were located in the suburbs, up from 55% in 1992. Perhaps as a result, suburban population growth grew by 11.9% from 1990 to 1998.

  Writing in The Atlantic Monthly last December, Bruce Katz and Jennifer Bradley of the Brookings Institution termed the decentralization phenomenon "metropolitanism." According to Katz and Bradley, "metropolitanism describes not only where but also in some sense how Americans live -- and it does this in a way that the city-suburb dichotomy does not. People work in one municipality, live in another, go to church or the doctor's office or the movies in yet another, and all these different places are somehow interdependent."

  Visit almost any major regional area in America -- Washington, D.C., Atlanta, Phoenix and Seattle are good examples -- and you can see the often-negative effects of this trend. Commerce and housing developments are moving further from the cities. Rapid growth in land use has raised a whole host of new environmental questions. Transportation -- and traffic -- problems have increased substantially. As the "State of the Cities" report notes, "As population and businesses keep moving outward, existing infrastructure is underutilized and social systems are being challenged."

Work to be done

The HUD report offers many suggestions on how to improve urban life, but those prescriptions are less valuable than the service the report provides of identifying trends that inarguably are affecting America's cities.

Whether one considers such trends positive or negative, it is clear that they complicate the question of whether the United States is amid some sort of urban renaissance. Given the additional facts that crime rates still remain dangerously high in many urban areas, and that public education in most cities is at crisis level, clearly much work is yet to be done in America's cities.