Urban Renewal’s Legacy

photo by Ziggymarley01

I was quoted in The Ledger (Florida) in Seeking Progress, City Upended Lives in Eliminating Moorehead Community. It opens,

After selecting Moorehead as the site of a new auditorium, Lakeland officials began efforts 50 years ago to inform residents, assess properties, make offers to owners and assist residents in finding new places to live.

Dividing the predominantly black neighborhood roughly in half, the city planned to acquire all of the eastern section north of Lime Street by 1971 and the remainder in 1972.

The campaign, which displaced 122 families, fit into a decades-long national phenomenon in which cities partially or completely removed minority neighborhoods for projects aimed at fostering urban renewal.

The American Housing Act of 1949, part of President Harry Truman’s “Fair Deal,” established the power of governments to seize private property for projects categorized as urban renewal. It also made federal funds available for such projects.

Though intended to replace substandard housing with better options, the Act spurred a flurry of activity that wound up displacing minorities, said David Reiss, a professor at Brooklyn Law School and academic program director of The Center for Urban Business Entrepreneurship. Cities used the program’s Title I funding to engage in what was sometimes called “Negro removal” or “slum clearance.”

Before the federal program was halted in 1974, some 2,500 urban renewal projects displaced about 1 million people nationwide, Reiss said.

“Two-thirds of those people were African-American, and if you think about African-Americans being 12 percent of the population, they were being displaced at a multiple, maybe at five times the rate of other Americans and particularly white Americans,” Reiss said. “So urban renewal really reshapes the urban fabric across the country.”

Property in minority communities tended to be cheaper to acquire, especially during the peak period of urban renewal, and Reiss said minorities also were less equipped to challenge authorities.

“It was structural racism on one level, where the majority would find it much easier to displace a black community than they would to displace a white community, although displacement wasn’t only in black communities — but as we see it’s overwhelmingly in black communities,” he said. “Because black communities were often poor, that would be another reason — being in a poor community would give you less political power to fight something like this.”

Urban Reviewer: NYC’s Neighborhood Plans

NYC land use geeks will want to check out the Urban Reviewer. From its website,

The City of New York has adopted over 150 master plans for our neighborhoods. You can see which areas have been affected and what those grand plans were here.

Neighborhood master plans – often called “urban renewal plans” – were adopted to get federal funding for acquiring land, relocating the people living there, demolishing the structures and making way for new public and private development. Plan adoptions started in 1949 and many plans remain active today. Development in the plan areas sometimes happened, like Lincoln Center, and sometimes didn’t, like many still-vacant lots in East New York and Bushwick. Areas were selected for renewal because they were considered blighted or obsolete. The “blight” designation always came from outside the communities that got that label – from inspectors working for the mayor’s Committee on Slum Clearance in the early period and Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) employees in the later period.

This is one of those resources that seem pretty obviously useful once someone has gone to the trouble (and great trouble I am sure it was) to construct it. One can imagine urban historians and planners making good use of it as well as community activists. It also provides a great model for other communities to follow.

Kudos to 596 Acres, Partner & Partners and SmartSign for building this resource.

Reiss on History of Eminent Domain

The Orlando Sentinel quoted me in History also Parts City, Church in Stadium Dispute  (sign in required). It reads in part,

It’s been said that you can’t fight City Hall. Still, tiny Faith Deliverance Temple is gonna try. The city of Orlando covets its property — now the final piece of the two square blocks upon which will bloom a $110 million soccer savanna for the Orlando City Lions to roam. Church officials balked. So city officials filed suit to seize the land. Goliath shoved. Now, David’s grabbed a sling.

The church has enlisted a Jacksonville property rights law firm to fight for its right to stay put. Any way you slice it, the church’s hopes rest with a judge who, in two previous eminent domain cases involving the soccer stadium, deemed that it fits the definition of a public use.

City Hall considers the stadium manna from Major League Soccer: It’ll nourish the greater community with economic development, jobs and tourism. Pastor Kinsey Shack, meanwhile, simply says her largely black flock “does not want and has not wanted to sell its property.”

It would be easy to reduce the dispute to simplistic terms: Seeing the writing on the wall, the church has fallen prey to the sin of avarice. Orlando offered $1.5 million for property worth less than half that, and most recently upped the ante to $4 million. Church leaders countered with $35 million (but later lowered it to $15 million).

To church officials, it’s simply a matter of fairness. In 2007, Orlando plunked $35 million in cash and other sweeteners into First United Methodist Church’s collection plate. It needed the land for the Dr. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts, and paid a small fortune to the largely white downtown church. In any case, church officials aren’t sweating the optics. Maybe that’s because money isn’t necessarily the root of its revolt.

An alternative motive seems rooted in history, personal and collective. In the late ’70s, Robert Lee Williams moved his wife Catherine, their four kids, and the church he’d incorporated in 1969 to West Church Street in Orlando’s mostly black Parramore neighborhood.

The teeny flock grew as he saved and collected souls through revivals. In the early ’80s, they moved to a West Church Street warehouse. With member donations, Williams bought the property, and largely through the sweat of local day laborers, they moved into a new church home in 1996. Williams died in 1997, but his wife carried on, before passing the mantle to Shack six years ago. For the Williams family, divesting the property divorces them from their community, their history.

Yet, through government strong-arming that very thing is — for blacks in particular — a sordid history as old as America. That’s according to Mindy Fullilove, a Columbia University clinical psychiatry professor in a recent report on the devastation eminent domain wreaks on black communities. “Eminent domain has become what the founding fathers sought to prevent: a tool that takes from the poor and the politically weak to give to the rich and politically powerful.”

David Reiss, a Brooklyn Law School professor, noted in an email that since early last century “local governments have a long history of using eminent domain in black communities, from so-called ‘slum clearance’ to ‘urban renewal’ to ‘blight removal.'”