THE RETURN OF a Democrat to the White House has led the nation’s big city mayors and other advocates of” urban interests to hope that the national government will once again fund a large-scale “urban policy.” The reigning assumption behind this hope, one validated by media coverage of the Los Angeles riots last year, is that America’s cities, especially its bigger ones, are in the grip of an “urban crisis” stemming largely from the federal government’s willful neglect of the cities during the twelve lean years of Republican presidential rule.