Tag Archives: urban renewal

Urban Renewal’s Legacy

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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.”

Expectations for Carson at HUD

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photo by Gage Skidmore

Dr. Ben Carson

The Christian Science Monitor quoted me in What Could US Cities Expect From Ben Carson as HUD Secretary?

Ben Carson, a former neurosurgeon and erstwhile rival of Donald Trump, was nominated Monday by the president-elect to lead the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).

If confirmed by the Senate to be secretary of HUD, Carson would oversee a department dedicated to developing and enacting policies on housing, focusing on building community in lower-income neighborhoods, providing financial assistance for homeowners, and preventing racial discrimination in local housing policies.

Reactions to the nomination have fallen largely along party lines, with many Democrats criticizing Carson’s lack of experience, having never held public office before – inexperience that also makes it hard to predict his potential priorities in a Trump administration. But he has been a frequent critic of social welfare programs, saying that church- and community-based initiatives are a better vehicle than government programs for assisting Americans in poverty.

“I am thrilled to nominate Dr. Ben Carson as our next secretary of the US Department of Housing and Urban Development,” Trump said in a statement released by his transition team. “Ben Carson has a brilliant mind and is passionate about strengthening communities and families within those communities. We have talked at length about my urban renewal agenda and our message of economic revival, very much including our inner cities.”

Trump and Carson had discussed the job before Thanksgiving, but Carson initially expressed reluctance to take a position on the cabinet, despite his campaign for the US presidency, because of his lack of experience in a political office. Since then, Carson has evidently overcome those reservations.

“I feel that I can make a significant contribution particularly by strengthening communities that are most in need,” Carson said in the statement.

Carson is the first African-American pick for Trump’s cabinet, and would likely be confirmed by the Republican-controlled Senate.

Carson’s communication skills give him “the ability to bring the message of poverty alleviation to people nationwide and I hope he would quickly learn the importance of HUD and would try to make it better, stronger, more efficient” Robert C. Moss, the national director of government affairs at CohnReznick, a public accounting firm, tells The Christian Science Monitor in an email.

“Carson is a very skilled speaker, maybe one of the best we’ll see in this role,” writes Mr. Moss, who specializes in affordable housing, “and if he hits on the right direction and takes the message around the country, he could help make the case for affordable housing.”

Trump’s campaign did not focus much on housing or urban development, other than to describe the state of poor “inner city” African-Americans and Hispanics as “disastrous” on multiple occasions. Many critics of Carson say that the former Republican presidential candidate ran on a platform of shrinking the role of government agencies like HUD, putting him at philosophical odds with the very department he will be in charge of.

HUD was created in 1965 in order to build stronger communities and create affordable housing for Americans with low incomes. The department was given the responsibility of enforcing the Fair Housing Act of 1968, which outlawed most forms of housing discrimination, including racial, religious, or based on family status.

African-Americans, in particular, have experienced decades of housing discrimination, says Professor Reiss.

“Redlining, the practice of refusing to provide credit in minority communities, was implemented on a national scale since the beginning of the New Deal, by government agencies like the Federal Housing Administration,” he says. “Such policies continued on for decades. These policies led, in part, to the disinvestment in cities through the 1960s that impacted African-American communities most of all.”

But some of the HUD’s recent rules have come under criticism for “social engineering.” One particular policy Carson has publicly opposed is the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) rule adopted by the Obama administration, which requires cities to monitor and report on any housing patterns of racial bias, in an effort to promote less segregated neighborhoods.

“The purpose of the AFFH rule is to reduce segregation which had been caused in part by the federal government’s own actions,” David Reiss, the academic program director for the Center for Urban Business Entrepreneurship
 at Brooklyn Law School, tells the Monitor in an email. The secretary of HUD “can signal that fair housing allegations and violations will be taken seriously or not. If Carson is confirmed, it will send a strong signal that local governments do not need to worry about the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule for the foreseeable future.”

Vacant Land in NYC

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photo by Eric Fischer

NYC Comptroller Stringer has released an Audit Report on the Development of City-Owned Vacant Lots by the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development. Stringer has  taken some cheap shots on Mayor DeBlasio’s housing plans before (here for instance). This report amounts to another one. The Audit Findings and Conclusion read,

Our audit found that the City owns over a thousand vacant lots that could be developed under existing urban renewal programs, but many of these lots have been allowed to languish and remain undeveloped for up to 50 years or longer.  While HPD contends that over the years it has disposed of most of the lots it has been responsible for, we found that as of September 18, 2015, HPD listed 1,131 vacant lots under its jurisdiction.  Further, we found that although HPD solicits developers to build on these properties, it has not established plans with realistic time schedules to actually transfer City-owned vacant properties to developers.

Pursuant to General Municipal Law § 502, HPD has devised urban renewal plans for areas that include its vacant properties.  However, we found that the projected schedules are often pushed to a later date and sometimes no date is specified at all, notwithstanding the fact that the law requires “a proposed time schedule for the effectuation of such plan.”  Accordingly, it appears that schedules with adequate procedures to enable the transfer of City-owned properties to developers in accordance with those schedules have not been consistently formulated.  Finally, we identified an additional 340 City-owned vacant lots under the jurisdiction of other City agencies that could be considered to be used for residential construction. (2)

Even the language of this summary reveals the Comptroller’s spin. It is laughable to say that the City has allowed vacant land “to languish and remain undeveloped  for up to 50 years or longer.” The fact is that the City took ownership of much of this land during the ’60s and ’70s because it was abandoned by the owners who did not pay their property taxes. Much of the land had absolutely no value for decades.

This has certainly changed in the last 20 years or so, so it is worth evaluating whether the City should be taking more aggressive steps to get this land developed. Certainly one would think that this Mayor would want to do just that. And indeed, the Comptroller’s report shows that the Mayor has slated over half of those parcels for development over the next few years. The City’s response to the Audit indicates that many of the remaining parcels pose development challenges for residential development.

My take (having written extensively about abandoned land in NYC, here for instance) is that Stringer is making a mountain out a molehill. Every mayor from Koch through De Blasio has attempted to develop or sell much of the vacant land owned by the City. This audit fails to demonstrate that the City has a serious problem on this count.

Wednesday’s Academic Roundup

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Urban Reviewer: NYC’s Neighborhood Plans

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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

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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.'”