"There was no way we could solve our problems alone," Mayor Harris adds.

Ted Mondale, chairman of the Metropolitan Council serving the Twin Cities, explained his council has served to build consensus among the individual governments within the metro area. The regional governing council operates the area's transit, sewage, parks and redevelopment services through a coordinated, collaborative effort. The council isoperating the area's Smart Growth Twin Cities Project, which considers smart growth as a single policy that ties together decisions on land use, housing, transportation, commercial development and environmental preservation. Taking a unified, regionalapproach to growth choices throughout the area has helped overcome obstacles from individual groups making unrealistic demands, Mondale adds.

Resident Fellow William H. Hudnut III, former mayor of Indianapolis who coordinated the ULI event, says that from the private sector's standpoint, developing projects in inner cities is often more complicated than developing in the suburbs. It typicallyinvolves dealing with more government, more zoning regulations, more land assembly, and possibly cleaning up a hazardous waste site, he explains, all of which takes more time.

However, the changing mindset of the public sector about what is necessary to stimulate private sector investment and provide a better quality of life is the reason cities are coming back, he adds. Inner cities and inner-ring suburbs in general are "better off than people think they are," Hudnut says.

"People want this to (urban revival) work,'' he said. "The resiliency of the human spirit is manifesting itself in cities on the rebound."