What's the Matter with Newark?

It's location could be picked as ideal in an urban planning text. Newark; 20 minutes from Midtown by train, a little more time on the PATH train to Wall St. Like Stamford, Conn. it should by all measurements be a booming satellite city.
Yet Newark, more than 40 years after the worst rioting in the nation in the 1960s' (along with Detroit) is constantly the Phoenix trying to rise out of ashes, and failing.
The former mayor is under indictment on a number of charges, and the drug markets are still running strong near the interstates. Newark last summer (07) even managed a triple murder of three college students that actually got airtime on major networks.
But the real question is how the city somehow cannot cash-in on its location and advantages.
They have built a lux arena for the NJ Devils, which is great, except it should be keeping the Nets, the basketball team. Twice the events in that case, and Brooklyners largely don't want an arena in the overcrowded heart of the borough. The new residents in the borough are largely culture snob types, which is fine, but are not constant fans the way bored suburban kids and middle=of-the-road type homeowners (with giant wall-mounted plasma screens!) are in in NJ.
Like Detroit, Newark built for itself a Blade Runner office complex around the railroad station. The buildings are connected by skywalks over the street grid for suburban commuters. The affluent scurrying above, the rest below, on the god-help-us sidewalks.
But, there are projects underway to lure Manhattanite types with much lower rents and bigger spaces. This is great, but may only last, as one city councilman said, "until the first white boy comes off the PATH at 3 am and is robbed and killed."
Our urban planning decisions, like so much else, are driven by race and crime. It has long since become tiresome. But . . . safety first.