Urban renewal: the scarlet letter of economic development

 

Oh, I used to walk down this street before.

But they’ve kicked out the folks I used to meet before.

And the neighborhood

Now is gone for good

There’s no street on the street where I lived.

(Sung to Rogers & Hammerstein “Streets Where You Lived” in Frieden and Sagalyn, 1991, p. 46)¹

Urban renewal is the scarlet letter of our profession—no one is willing to acknowledge its parentage. Blame and selective memories abound, but no one climbs the scaffold, like Roger Dimmesdale, to accept the shame and responsibility. The outline and chronology of legislation and programs will speak for itself. Part of the problem is that urban renewal is the last of several physical demolition/renewal phases that started in 1933—ostensibly to provide jobs and housing through slum clearance and public housing. Slum clearance for wartime worker housing followed, and at a later point the federal interstate highway program dug up large swathes of city neighborhoods while land was cleared for high-rise public housing. The last phase, “dubbed urban renewal,” led by business elites, dug up the CBD and intra-city “eds and meds” expansion. That last phase got going only in the mid/late 1950s–early 1960s. It may be there are so many fathers of urban renewal that paternity will be hard to discern.

We can all agree on one thing: it didn’t work. What slum clearance et al. was supposed to do, however, is not at all evident. Big Cities were dug up for a lot of reasons, including: emergency job creation; highway construction; amelioration of an affordable housing crisis; revitalization of the CBD; key institutional expansion in congested districts; and housing for workers to make tanks, planes, ships and bullets against the Axis. There is, however, a common thread that underlies many (not all) of these specific rationales: the goal of modernizing the central Big Cities so that they could compete with the rapidly developing suburb—preservation of the Big City hegemony over its hinterlands. That such modernization came at the expense of those least able to defend themselves, damnable as it is, should not be a surprise. Community development’s “public housers” and planners played an early leading role: chambers supported highways and CBD/eds and meds as well as worker housing; and local real estate elites bushwhacked the path to CBD revitalization. Plenty of goals/reasons; plenty of supporters.

Cheering off to the sidelines were the national and local media, the Policy World and mayors/city councils that approved the necessary legislation and funded the local share—and professions, including the yet to be called economic developers who staffed redevelopment and urban renewal agencies that did the deed. By the way, no one, in these years, was voted out of office because of all these shenanigans, and bond referenda passed easily while public opinion polls reveal strong citizen and voter support. By 1960 nearly every state in the Union had adopted some form of housing redevelopment and urban renewal legislation. As long as your house was not on the path of destruction, it sounded like a good idea. Slum clearance to urban renewal was no accident: it persisted for over 30 years; it was hardly a hidden conspiracy to achieve selfish ends. To atone for slum clearance, public housing, highway construction, worker housing and CBD renewal will require a “walk of shame” the size of a Fourth of July parade.

Over the intervening three-quarters of a century we smushed municipal and federal inputs, public housing and CBD-focused projects; forgot or discounted nearly 40 years of housing projects (over 1000); and overemphasized deleterious effects of CBD revitalization into a stereotype ideological, polemical straw man. The “thrust of the smush” has made “urban renewal the scarlet letter of our profession and policy area—merely a shameless real estate/corporate grab for profits that crushed poor blacks. Urban renewal has been defined as, and is judged by, its effects on neighborhood and resident communities—and that too has been smushed into “Negro removal.” Lost are the larger context of the era: the multiple goals intended to accomplish the more honorable policy intentions of its participants; the variation among projects, regions and time periods; and the lessons from more than 40 years of our historical experience. There is more to be learned from urban renewal than “just don’t do it.”

It is often forgotten in the midst of all this [controversy] that urban renewal is not a goal, but a tool. It is a method whereby a great variety of ends can be served, some good, some bad. Since the use of that tool is left largely in the hands of local communities, the number of different goals which will be served, and the probability that not all will be judged ideal, is rather large. “… Given this welter of aims and achievements, it is understandable that urban renewal should mean very different things to different people. (Wilson, 1966, pp. xv–xvi)

In this chapter and others that follow we will try to provide some understanding (un-smush) of the chronology and pose questions:

• Why is public housing and neighborhood slum clearance community/economic development?
• What was the larger purpose (goal) of housing, neighborhood slum clearance and CBD redevelopment?
• Was the federal government (and its legislation) the “tail end” of urban renewal, wagged by municipal-levels dogs? Or did the Federal Government wag the state and local tail?
• How and why did urban renewal become the midwife of late twentieth century “mainstream,” governmental-based economic development?
• What were the different “forms” of urban renewal—how did it vary among projects, cities, regions and period of time?