Dream City

Dream City: Race, Power, and the Decline of Washington, D.C., 1964-1994. Book review by Mark Feldstein, Washington Monthly, April 1994.

Excerpt:

Barry didn't forget it--nor did he forget the rest of the white business community. "In return for financing his campaigns, for withholding most criticisms of his government, and for including Barry's friends in their deals," Jaffe and Sherwood write, "Barry would give the businessmen almost a free hand in developing Washington's downtown business district."

One developer, Jeffrey Cohen, godfather to Barry's son, got millions in tax breaks and deals from the Barry administration. In February 1985, for example, the city paid Cohen $11 million for land it valued at only $6.7 million. And Cohen set up a dummy corporation to give Barry a secret 10 percent partnership in a million-dollar office building in Massachusetts.

It was much the same when it came to awarding city contracts. Here, Barry sold out for mere pennies on the dollar--"crumbs," as one former city official put it, of women and drugs. As a lobbyist for the Greater Washington Board of Trade said, "a little sleaze will never stand in the way of economic development." ...

Under Barry's mayoral regime, infant mortality was up, welfare checks were late, emergency ambulances never showed up at all. It's not that there wasn't enough money; Washington's taxes are among the highest per capita in the country. Rather, too much money went to too many cronies, and the money that did get into the system was wildly mismanaged.

For example, the aptly named Pitts welfare motel charged taxpayers more to rent a room to a homeless person than it would have cost to rent a suite at the Watergate. Millions of dollars that Barry could have collected from the federal government to build public housing was lost because his administration failed to file the proper paperwork. This all happened in the mid-eighties, when public housing waiting lists were double what they were in 1974 and a HUD audit found that apartments remained vacant for an average of a year and a half--plenty of time for vandals to destroy the chance that one of those 13,000 people waiting (some for as long as 10 years) might get a decent home.

Just as bad, according to the book, was the way Barry corrupted the city's police, promoting officers based on their willingness to ignore or cover up his own drug crimes. Time after time, honest cops were punished for trying to investigate the numerous reports of the mayor's drug use. Some police, acting as bodyguards, even accompanied Barry on his nocturnal prowling; "the dog is running" was the code-phrase they used over the police radio. At the same time, Barry slashed the number of officers and lowered minimum standards to the point where convicted felons were being hired as cops.

Also see the New York Times book review by Tom Wicker, "Shame Along the Potomac."

Index Keywords: ?