
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, October 17, 1993                   TAG: 9312300021
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: D2   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

NEW REPORT

PHRASES like "urban affairs" and "urban problems" have come to be commonplace, perhaps euphemestic, substitutes for more direct phrases like "community breakdown" and "the problems of poverty."

But the two sets of concerns, while clearly related, aren't necessarily the same.

This is evident from the recommendations, reported last week, of the Governor's Commission on the Revitalization of Virginia's Urban Areas. Most of the recommendations aren't about cities per se. They're about social problems that, although most often associated with cities, are neither exclusive to cities nor endemic to all parts of all cities.

Indeed, on the issue most directly related to cities as cities, their general inability under state law to expand boundaries, the commission simply called for more study.

Otherwise, the commission spoke loud and clear.

Crime should be fought more vigorously, with more community policing and foot patrols in tough neighborhoods, boot camps for young offenders, and use of state troopers as needed to combat drug-related crime. Tax breaks, including expansion of state enterprise zones, should be provided for job-creating businesses in inner-city neighborhoods. College scholarship programs should be used to get more teachers into city classrooms. State efforts to reduce teen pregnancy should be expanded.

Those proposals - and they're good, if rather obvious, ones - are directed at social ills that are found in their acutest form in VIrginia's big cities. It is therefore the cities that need the most help in addressing them.

But Virginia suburbanites also worry about youth crime and illegal drugs. The shortage of job-creating businesses is also a central concern in rural Virginia. The quality of public education affects the quality of the commonwealth's future work force, wherever the location. Teen-pregnancy rates are on the rise in virtually all segments of society.

And if inner-urban decay seems not to affect directly most suburbs today, give it time - and more tax dollars.

The distinction between "urban problems" and "social problems" is worth making because the commission's recommendations are worthwhile. If those recommendations are to become more than words on a piece of paper, they must have the support of more than just city-dwellers. All Virginians, it should be understood, will be affected by how well the challenge of "urban problems" is met.

by CNB