Strong Currents of Change

New blocs gain power in Houston, Miami, San Francisco

Crime, poverty, racial tension. The symptoms are so depressingly similar from one urban center to another that they are often lumped together in one catchall phrase: "the problem of the cities." Politically, however, the cities make up a complex and ever shifting mosaic, as local elections across the nation demonstrated last week. In general, the cities' voters remained loyal to incumbents, and still more so to the Democratic Party. But there were strong crosscurrents of change in some big cities. Most notable: the sudden rise to prominence of new voting blocs in Houston, Miami and San Francisco, and the equally sudden demise of the tough-guy mayoral style in Cleveland, Philadelphia and Minneapolis.

Perhaps the most drastically changed city government is the one in Houston. Under prodding from the U.S. Department of Justice, which has been hearing loud complaints about discrimination from the oil capital's black and Hispanic minorities, Houston shifted from a city council of eight members, all elected at large, to one of 14 members, with nine chosen from separate districts and the remainder chosen at large. Blacks thereby increased their representation from one to three, and State Representative Ben Reyes became Houston's first Mexican-American councilman. In addition, three women stand a chance of winning runoff elections for council posts, though no woman has ever sat on that city's council before.

Incumbent Democratic Mayor Jim McConn, a suecessful builder, is expected to win the runoff, but the new council will change the basic style of Houston's government. It will almost certainly debate municipal issues publicly, rather than holding all discussions behind closed doors, as the old council did. It will be less attentive to downtown business interests, may be less anxious to annex white suburban areas until services in the center city improve, and will surely be more solicitous of poor areas. Vows Ernest McGowen, a black mailman who will represent Houston's northeast section: "People in office haven't heard from this side of town, but they will."

Miami became the only major mainland U.S. city to be governed primarily by Hispanics. Puerto Rican-born Mayor Maurice Ferre won a-fourth term, and Hispanics were assured of three posts on the five-member city commission. They retained two seats, and a runoff for another commission post will pit two Cuban-born candidates against each other. Indeed, twelve of the 16 candidates for top city offices were of Latin background.

The Hispanics hastened to assure their neighbors that the outcome meant, in Ferre's words, "no Latin takeover." Armando Lacasa, who campaigned successfully for election to the city commission with Spanish-language posters urging PROTECT OUR OWN, nonetheless proclaimed that the commission must offer "a piece of the action to everybody." Still, the election testified to the growing strength of "little Havana," Miami's huge community of Cuban exiles. Hispanics make up 55% of Miami's population and only 31% of the registered voters, but they trooped to the polls in impressive numbers. Miami's non-Hispanics, like most other Americans, did not.

San Francisco's assertive homosexual population unexpectedly won the balance of political power in that city. Mayor Dianne Feinstein had expected to win a majority, but she polled only 42%. That forced her into a Dec. 11 runoff, which she might lose to Runner-Up Quentin Kopp, a conservative member of the board of supervisors. One reason Feinstein failed to win was the success of minor candidates: Punk-Rock Singer Jello Biafra astonished even himself by taking 3% of the vote. More significant, David Scott, an openly homosexual real estate agent who called Feinstein and Kopp "Tweedledum and Tweedledee," won 10%. How his followers vote will be decisive in the runoff, and both candidates will be courting them in the next few weeks. They must do so while also appealing to an apparent conservative mood among other voters. San Franciscans defeated proposals to install strict rent controls, disband the city's vice squad and raise business taxes.

In Cleveland and Philadelphia, a kind of politics of civility triumphed; both cities elected men who presented themselves as healers to succeed loudly abrasive mayors. Cleveland's self-styled populist, Dennis Kucinich, elected in 1977 at the age of 31, won nationwide notoriety for his abusive assaults on the city council, Cleve land's big corporations and banks -- and even more for the fact that Cleveland last year became the first major U.S. city since the 1930s to default on debt repayments. Cold-shouldered by the Cleveland Democratic organization and almost beaten in a recall election last year, Kucinich fo cused his campaign for re-election on Cleveland's blacks; he persuaded Heavyweight Champion Larry Holmes and former Mayor Carl Stokes to endorse him on TV. The strategy did not work: Kucinich lost to Republican George Voinovich, Ohio's Lieutenant Governor, who played down his party affiliation and promised "a new spirit of cooperation" among businessmen, labor, and civic and neighborhood groups. Voinovich carried ten of Cleveland's 13 black wards as well as most of the city's white districts. Said he: "Populism doesn't mean anything if you can't deliver services to the people. They can't eat populism, they can't put it over their roofs."

And Philadelphia bade farewell to Frank Rizzo, the outspoken ex-cop who once appealed to Philadelphians to "vote white." Rizzo failed last year to persuade voters to amend the city charter so that he could win a third term, and he stayed grumpily aloof from the election, pronouncing a pox on all his would-be successors. Said he: "Between the three of them, if you scrambled their brains, you wouldn't get a half-wit."

The easy winner was William Green, one of the city's Congressmen for seven terms. Green's father ran the Democratic machine for years in a metropolis where registered Democrats now outnumber Republicans almost 4 to 1. Ted Kennedy campaigned for him, and Green spent five times as much money as his two opponents put together.

In Minneapolis too the hard-nosed cop image seemed to lose its appeal. It was personified in that city by Charles Stenvig, a policeman who won three two-year terms as mayor, the most recent in 1975. He tried for a fourth last week, distributing one pamphlet in which he was pictured wrapped in the American flag.

He was trounced, 2 to 1, by Donald Fraser, a liberal Democrat who represented a Minneapolis district in Congress for 16 years. Fraser urged depoliticizing the police-department and ostentatiously discouraged campaign contributions from individual police officers.

In other cities it was politics as usual. Incumbent Democratic mayors won reelection easily in Gary, Ind., and Salt Lake City, incumbent Republicans in Columbus and Indianapolis. In Boston, Kevin White cruised to an unprecedented fourth consecutive four-year term as mayor, winning both black Roxbury and white South Boston, whose residents often throw angry epithets--and sometimes more harmful things than that--at each other. In most cases, voters seemed less enthusiastic for the existing order than wearily convinced that a change of command at city hall would not make much difference. But as the results in Houston, Miami, San Francisco, Cleveland, Philadelphia and Minneapolis demonstrated, no one can take the city voter for granted: the bloc appeals and political styles that swept to triumph in the last election may guarantee defeat in the next.

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