Blogger Candidate Forum: Uplift Or Destruction

http:/www.nytimes.com/2016/12/07/upshot/why-trumps-use-of-the-words-urban-renewal-is-scary-for-cities.html?mwrsm=Email&_r=0

PEOTUS on the campaign trail
usnews.com

Hello Everyone:

Time for the weekly cold-free edition of the Blogger Candidate Forum.  A quick program note, thanks to your response to the insider's view of the American elections, yours truly will continue this weekly in the new year.  After all, if President-elect Donald Trump's campaign and transition process are indication, the next four years should be a wild ride and someone has to give you a look inside.  Speaking of wild rides, today's subject PEOTUS's understanding of the words "urban renewal."

Those two words-urban renewal-produce shudders among contemporary historic preservationists, urban planners and designers.  They evoke images of long term residents of low- and moderate income residents forcibly displaced to make way for city bisecting highways, monolithic apartment towers, small businesses replaced bland boring boxes masquerading as office buildings.  Fortunately, we have moved on from the days when New York City "master builder" Robert Moses and the godmother of modern planning and preservation Jane Jacobs battled over the future of their city.  Today, we have a president-elect who plans for urban revival (a more benign phrase) harken back to the bad old days.  Emily Badger's recent Upshot column, "Why Trump's Use of the Words 'Urban Renewal' Is Scary" for The New York Times, an analysis of what PEOTUS Trump proposes for American cities.

POTUS-elect at a campaign rally in Charlotte
Charlotte, North Carolina
myfox8.com

Two weeks before his surprise electoral victory, PEOTUS Trump spoke at a Charlotte, North Carolina rally in which he outlined his plan for African Americans in cities.  The speech titled, "New Deal for Black America," in which he proposed a series of idea that promised greater school choice, safer communities, lower taxes, and better infrastructure.  The document, which can be viewed at http://www.donaldjtrump.com, is a ten-point plan is subtitled "A Plan for Urban Renewal," is as close to an actual proposal for urban America.

HUD Secretary-designate Ben Carson
biography.com

The troublesome nomination of Dr. Ben Carson to head the Department of Housing and Urban Development was the product of conversations between Dr. Carson and PEOTUS.  Specifically PEOTUS said they talked at length about my urban renewal agenda.  Allow Blogger to digress for a moment, Dr. Carson is a brilliant neurosurgeon.  He would be the person yours truly would want cutting open my mother's skull.  However, he is not qualified to head this cabinet-level department.  Despite his stellar accomplishments, Dr. Carson is a medical professional, not a public health professional.  These are two separate fields.  Further, he has publicly admitted that he is not qualified to run a cabinet-level department.  That said, we will see in January, what the Senate hearings for cabinet nominees reveal.  Back to the post.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt and The New Deal
en.wikipedia.org

Emily Badger writes, "HIs language has an odd ring to it, not solely for marrying Franklin D, Roosevelt's New Deal with the post-World War II era of urban renewal.  If Mr. Trump was reaching for a broadly uplifting concept-renewal-he landed instead on a term with very specific, and very negative, connotations for the population he says he aims to help."

Academics and a majority of city dwellers, urban renewal is remembered for its wholesale destruction of ethnic communities, entire neighborhoods were demolished to accommodate housing, highways, and civic projects.  You may ask "what is wrong with that?"  

Allow Mary Pattillo, a sociologist at Northwestern University to explain, This is a loaded phrase.  Ms. Pattillo suspects that the plethora of PEOTUS's comments, on the campaign trail, regarding "inner cities" and African Americans were directly time at Caucasian audiences.  However, it appears less likely that he is repeating his comments and subtly communicating that his urban initiative will really benefit poor minorities.  Ms. Pattillo told The New York Times:

We have no clue...There's no way to know how much he knows,how well-informed he is, how strategic he's being, if he's being off-the-cuff.

Emily Badger likens this to the rather strange phone conversation PEOTUS Trump had with the President of Taiwan.  She writes, "Is Mr. Trump knowingly or accidentally embracing historical conflict?  The answer depends, in part on how much we think Mr. Trump,...knows about the history of the conflict over the shape of the American city.

Southwest Urban Renewal area
npc.gov

The term "urban renewal" has its origins in the Housing Act of 1954; its 1949 predecessor referred to the same policy as "urban redevelopment."  According to these laws, "...the federal government gave cities the power and money to condemn 'slum' neighborhoods, clear them through eminent domain, then turn over the land to private developers at cheap rates for projects that included higher-end housing, hospitals, hotels, shopping centers and college expansions."

Following the 1956 Highway Act, this process displaced communities to open up land for urban thoroughfares.

The intended goal of urban renewal was the elimination of poor, deteriorating neighborhoods while increasing tax revenues, stimulating private investments, attracting middle class residents and shoppers back to the city.  It was half of what Ms. Pattillo calls "the federal government's schizophrenic policy at the time: As the government was incentivizing middle-class whites to move to the suburbs, it also invested heavily in trying to rebuild central cities to draw them back in."

Hyde Park A & B
docomomo-us.org

Urban renewal was promoted as progress.  Lawrence Vale, a professor of urban design and planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology told The New York Times:

A lot of the emphasis in urban renewal was on the 'new' part of renewal-that this was a way of moving forward.

Be that as it may, progress came at the expense of the bulldozed communities.  The hoped for middle class families and shoppers did not return to the cities-at least not for decades.  Sociologist Herbert Gans wrote in 1965 that the program was a method for eliminating the slums in order to 'renew' the city rather than a program for properly rehousing slum-dwellers.

Urban renewal was essentially about places, not people-the people in the path of redeveloping said places were frequently displaced to other slums or unaffordable housing.  Rarely were they welcomed back to what replaced their homes.  Mr. Gans wrote, "And less than 1 percent of all federal spending for urban renewal between 1949 and 1964 went to relocation."

Herbert Gans
niemanlab.org

The now retired Mr. Gans responded to this last statistic:

That gives you a sense of what this thing was all about,...Saving cities in an era of suburbanization and declining tax rolls was more important to the federal government than helping poor people.

During this period, "...four units of low-income housing were destroyed for every one new unit was built."  Further, over two-thirds of the displaced were African American or Latino, a trend that was clear in 1963, when writer James Baldwin stated "urban renewal 'means Negro removal.'"

In the early sixties, the chorus of critiques of the policy grew.  Jane Jacobs's seminal The Death and Life of Great American Cities disparaged the social networks torn asunder by urban renewal and the bland boring megaliths built in their places.

Herbert Gans studied the ethnic Italian West End of Boston wrecked by urban renewal.  His 1962 book, The Urban Villagers, reveal "that looked like a 'slum' contained a vibrant community of multi-generation families who considered their neighborhood a good place to live."

Boston's West End during urban renewal
archive.boston.com

Yet, the urban renewal process continues.  Psychologist Marc Fried, studying the same community, documented the severe grief experienced by the residents after they lost their homes.  They served what Columbia researcher Mindy Fullilove elegantly named "root shock."  She argued, "Pull people from their communities,...and they experience trauma unlike what happens when you uproot a plant."

The urban renewal era continue into the early seventies, after which a host of alternative ideas followed: Community Development Block Grants, "enterprise zones," and "promise neighborhoods."

What remained was lingering suspicion-the name was irrelevant-of public and private-developer proposals for lower income and minority communities.  Ms. Pattillo said,

There's no question that skepticism, that wariness, that worry is palpable,...Who are they doing it for? is what you hear.  when the alleys get pave, when a new store gets built, who are they doing for?

The federal government is already one of the least trusted institutions without the phrase "urban renewal."  Mr. Vale continued:

When I talk to people about contemporary redevelopment of public housing in certain cities, the words they use are, "We don't want another round of urban renewal in our neighborhoods"...Even though it's a long time ago, I'm struck by how frequently people who are being impacted by changes they don't want to see in their neighborhoods will evoke that earlier era.

It will be interesting to see what the incoming Trump administration has in store for the African American and Latino urban communities.  Even more puzzling will be how Dr. Ben Carson, if confirmed by the Senate, will lead the Department of Housing and Urban Development.  Stay tuned.