Urban Affairs

Washington. -- With its friendly image, fabled entertainment network and $824 million in average yearly earnings, why did the Walt Disney Co. come a cropper in northern Virginia?Neal R. Peirce writes a column on state and urban affairs.

DRAMATIC DROPS in murders and other violent crimes, now reported in major cities coast to coast, may be the best news yet for urban America in the '90s.Neal R. Peirce writes a column on state and urban affairs.

Are America's burgeoning prisons ready for reinvented government? With the nation's inmate population soaring past one million, more than doubled since the early '80s, the question has never been more acute.Neal R. Peirce writes a column on state and urban affairs.

The City Council gave preliminary approval last night to a Mount Vernon renewal plan that supports lower building heights than what developers and city officials had originally sought for the historic neighborhood. After several years of contentious negotiations among residents, developers and planning officials, community leaders credited Council President Sheila Dixon last night for brokering a compromise. "This was a cohesive partnership between all parties," Dixon said after the council unanimously moved the plan one step closer to final approval.

Chicago. YOU CAN CALL him theoretician, evangelist or agitator. He grew up as a disciple of the late radical organizer Saul Alinsky, in the city that invented scrappy neighborhood organization. Some associates dub him ''the Buckminster Fuller of the neighborhood movement.''John L. McKnight, professor of urban affairs at Northwestern University, is America's lead proponent of the idea that bureaucratic social services are strangling neighborhoods and their people, exacerbating the very problems they're supposed to correct.

Three years after an Inner Harbor statue of William Donald Schaefer was unveiled, admirers of the city's first African-American mayor want to erect a statue of him nearby. A nonprofit foundation created to honor the late Clarence "Du" Burns, who succeeded Schaefer, is asking the city for permission to place an 8-foot-tall statue on the Inner Harbor's west shore, 800 feet south of the Schaefer statue. "What we want to do is tell Du's story, not just that he was the first African-American mayor of Baltimore but the role he played in the creation of the Inner Harbor" and other economic development initiatives, said Sean D. Burns, a local attorney who heads the Clarence "Du" Burns Memorial Fund Inc. "It's been a long time coming.

After four years of urban unrest and a host of new programs to deal with it, President Lyndon B. Johnson helped create in 1968 a small independent research organization to examine the effectiveness of his antipoverty agenda. "It was understood by those involved that the programs were not based on an understanding of what works but by a drive to do something," says William Gorham, who founded The Urban Institute and headed it until two years ago. A third of a century later, the self-described "nonpartisan economic and social policy research organization" has more than 400 staffers, a focus on broad national policy as well as specific city programs -- and plenty of company.

The Baltimore Development Corp. said yesterday that the state has approved a fifth enterprise zone for the city.The Central Area Enterprise Zone encompasses the Waverly business district on both sides of Greenmount Avenue and extends south of 33rd Street to Baltimore Street.The original plan for the zone, which offers targeted tax breaks to new and existing businesses, had been controversial because it included only the east side of Greenmount Avenue and included the Memorial Stadium site.

Think famous love affairs: Romeo and Juliet. Scott and Zelda. Rush Limbaugh and himself. Roseanne and Tom. Then remember that the first couple ended up dead, the second divorced and depressed, the third rich but fat and alone, and as for the last, rumor has it they turned into hot air blimps in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade and were last spotted drifting on the zephyrs above Paramus, N.J.So for perdurable, passionate, undisappointing relationships, you...

'Urbanite,' a free monthly magazine focused on urban affairs in the Baltimore area, will go out of business at the end of September, publisher Tracy Ward said Friday.   She said the print magazine now on the street is the last, and that the website will most likely go dark as of Oct. 1 "for the foreseeable future," even though she herself will probably keep working through the end of the year to tie up loose ends. Ward has owned the publication for almost a decade.   "A lot of people rallied around it," she said in telephone interview Friday afternoon.