Grading Obama's Urban Policy Legacy

In 2008, Barack Obama ran for the presidency on a message of hope. And urban America felt it. They helped put him in the White House, and when he got there, they waited, expectations swelling.

City residents and urbanists had reasons to believe Obama would usher in a new urban era. Just like them, he was cosmopolitan: He grew up in Hawaii and Indonesia, and spent time in many different parts of the U.S. He had started his career in Chicago, a city that in many ways epitomizes the best and worst of urban life. As a community organizer on the South Side, he rallied the African-American community there around issues like contaminated water and asbestos in public housing, familiar problems in neglected neighborhoods around the U.S. And of course, he was black.