Democrats run practically every major city in the country and have for decades. Over 80% of our country's GDP is generated in cities ran by Democrats. Some of those cities are failing, like a Detroit or Cleveland, while many succeed like Houston, Denver, Seattle and so on. The correlation as to whether a city fails or succeeds has more to do with how desirable the location is than anything else. For example, you can draw a clear correlation between the decline of Northern rustbelt cities and the ascent of Sunbelt cities with the beginning of widespread use of Air Conditioning in the 1950s. Detroit looked a lot better than Dallas until everyone started getting A/C in their homes and businesses.
The problem with concentrated poverty is it results in a lack of the networks needed to climb out of poverty. There are plenty of white people that live in poverty, but the vast majority of them live in proximity to people that are not in poverty. The same is not true of black people in poverty. For example, I grew up in poverty. Not just poor, but in poverty in the South. I am demographically in the upper middle class today. It takes a lot of hard work and drive to get out of poverty, but what it also takes is networks. For example, I got my first really good IT job because the senior partner's wife at that firm was a customer of my mom's. My brother is an electrician because one of the guys he grew up with had a father that owned and electrical contracting outfit. People living in concentrated poverty do not have those networks.
As to public programs and their impact. The right constantly derides LBJ's Great Society, but the Great Society cut the poverty rate for blacks by close to 70% in less than 10 years. The educational initiatives started by Clinton and continued with Bush's No Child Left Behind, did have some success. Indeed, the two best high schools today in the entire KC area are majority minority, in inner city communities. Millions of blacks moved out of poverty and into the middle class during the 1990s with programs like moving to opportunity, community policing (one of the good aspects of the much derided crime bill), and growing median incomes at the time.
The point is it's all very complicated, yet those on the far left and guys like Tucker Carlson want to overly simplify it. For example, St. Louis' biggest problem is not governance (though that has been a problem in the past), its that the city is hemned in to its orignal city limits and was not able to grow its boundaries in response to white flight, thus much of it is a hollowed out core of concentrated poverty left in the wake of whites moving out to escape diverse neighborhoods.
That all said, prior to the pandemic, cities were on the revival across America. Here in Kansas City, there was new development "East of Troost", an area that represented the old red lining, for the first time in decades. The city was rapidly growing over the last 10 years with young whites seeing the diverse neighborhoods in the city being much more desirable than the suburbs. For those that do want to live in the suburbs, the older, much more diverse inner ring suburbs are far more desirable than the newer, more white, outer-burbs.
