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URBAN REDEVELOPMENT

URBAN REDEVELOPMENT. Nineteenth-century slum housing in the United States consisted of buildings with warrens of tiny, poorly ventilated rooms that resulted in a high incidence of infant mortality and infectious diseases among the European immigrant population. Reform movements began in 1901, with the New York State Tenement House Law and continued in the 1930s with zoning ordinances (intended to separate residential areas from the health-endangering waste products of industrial activities) and federal loans to build housing for workers who had fallen on hard times during the GREAT DEPRESSION.

During the 1940s and 1950s, as immigrants prospered and moved out of the TENEMENTS, much increasingly decrepit housing stock was still in place in Northeastern and Midwestern cities, which had become destinations for southern blacks seeking better-paid factory employment. Rampant housing discrimination created racially segregated neighborhoods. Lacking an adequate tax base and political clout, these areas and populations lagged in the quality of schools, roads, police protection, and other city services. Nevertheless, even segregated neighborhoods of this period generally included solidly middle-class residents and thriving businesses.

After World War II, urban planners (then largely concerned with accommodating the increasing presence of automobiles) and social reformers (focused on providing adequate affordable housing) joined forces in what proved to be an awkward alliance. The major period of urban renovation in the United States began with Title I of the 1949 Housing Act: the Urban Renewal Program, which provided for wholesale demolition of slums and the construction of some eight-hundred thousand housing units throughout the nation. The program's goals included eliminating substandard housing, constructing adequate housing, reducing de facto segregation, and revitalizing city economies. Participating local governments received federal subsidies totaling about $13 billion and were required to supply matching funds.

Bad News for the Inner City

Sites were acquired through eminent domain, the right of the government to take over privately owned real estate for public purposes, in exchange for "just compensation." After the land was cleared, local governments sold it to private real estate developers at below-market prices. Developers, however, had no incentives to supply housing for the poor. In return for the subsidy and certain tax abatements, they built commercial projects and housing for the upper-middle class. Title III of the Housing Act of 1954 promoted the building of civic centers, office buildings, and hotels on the cleared land. Land that remained vacant because it was too close for comfort to remaining slum areas often became municipal parking lots.

Interstate highways funded by the Highway Act of 1956 not only hastened "white flight" (the departure of middle-class white residents to new suburban housing developments) but also physically divided cities. Little thought was given to the results of leveling inner-city neighborhoods to build the new interstates: the destruction of neighborhoods and displacement of low-income residents.

More than two thousand construction projects on one thousand square miles of urban land were undertaken between 1949 and 1973, when the urban renewal program officially ended. Roughly six hundred thousand housing units were demolished, compelling some two million inhabitants to move. Thousands of small businesses were forced to close. In New York City, more than one hundred thousand African Americans were uprooted, destroying the social and economic fabric of many neighborhoods.

The original legislation had stipulated that for each new unit of housing built, at least one old unit of housing was to be torn down. Yet only 0.5 percent of all federal expenditures for urban renewal between 1949 and 1964 was spent on family relocation. A 1961 study of renewal projects in forty-one cities found that 60 percent of the tenants (even more in large cities) were merely relocated to other slums, exacerbating the problem of overcrowding. Slum evacuees who found better housing often had to pay higher rents.

After 1960, federally subsidized loans increasingly underwrote the rehabilitation, rather than wholesale demolition, of blighted neighborhoods. In 1964 Congress passed legislation to assist relocated persons who could not afford their new rents. Still, despite the good intentions that prompted urban renewal, most observers now agree that the process was deeply flawed.

The Public Housing Debacle

The public housing built in the 1950s—ironically, based on the utopian architecture of European modernist Charles-É douard Jeanneret Le Corbusier—was designed to squeeze as many families as possible onto expensive urban real estate. Slab-like high-rise complexes, poorly planned and constructed, housed as many as twelve thousand people (in the notorious Pruitt-Igoe project in St. Louis, Missouri). Known by residents as "the projects," these buildings were increasingly plagued by vandalism, drug use, rape, assault, robbery, and murder.

A 1969 law that abolished minimum rents and stipulated that no family would have to pay more than 25 percent of its income to rent an apartment in public housing lacked federal subsidies to make up for the lost revenue. While public housing authorities went bankrupt, the projects increasingly filled with people who had no income at all. The 1981 Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act created priority categories for public housing that insured only the "truly needy" were served while ignoring poor working families who had spent years on waiting lists.

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Literally and figuratively walled off from the rest of the city, the projects became islands of despair and dereliction.

Allied to the failures of urban development as a means of alleviating housing shortages was and is owner abandonment of rental apartment housing; they stop making repairs and paying taxes, and accumulate so many building violations that legal occupation is no longer permitted. Destroyed by vandalism or arson, these buildings become city property, to be torn down or rehabilitated at public expense. Other apartment buildings are "warehoused," awaiting gentrification of the neighborhood, when they may be rehabilitated and sold at a profit.

Urban Redevelopment after 1973

New thinking about the nature and function of American cities has led to public-private partnerships that frequently succeed in modest, yet measurable, ways where large-scale methods have failed. The Housing and Community Development Act of 1974 emphasized rehabilitation, preservation, and gradual change rather than demolition and displacement. Under the Community Development Block Grant program, local agencies bear most of the responsibility for revitalizing decayed neighborhoods. Successful programs include urban homesteading, whereby properties seized by the city for unpaid taxes are given to new owners who promise to bring them "up to code" within a given period—either by "sweat equity" (doing the work themselves) or by employing contractors—in return for free title to the property. Under the Community Reinvestment Act, lenders make low-interest loans to help the neighborhood revitalization process.

The federal Empowerment Zone program, initiated in 1994 in Atlanta, Baltimore, Chicago, Detroit, New York, and Philadelphia-Camden, with two "supplementary" awards to Los Angeles and Cleveland, gave each city $100 million plus a package of tax benefits to encourage economic development in blighted areas. Provisions include tax-exempt bond financing for business expansion and tax credits for investments in distressed areas. More cities were added to the program in 1998 and 2001.

Two basic design directions have prevailed in urban redevelopment: creating new pedestrian zones and reclaiming underused or deteriorating areas of a city by blending them into a city's historic fabric. Widening sidewalks, permitting mixed-use zoning (mingling residential and business uses), planting trees, adding lighting, and establishing a pleasing variety of building facades promote economic vitality by encouraging people to spend time downtown.

Several theories about the overall failure of city planning are currently in vogue. An argument for greater involvement of local residents—as a counterweight to the dictates of distant professional planners—is often coupled with the need to empower poor and minority groups to lobby for changes that will benefit them. Another view emphasizes the significance of global forces, including foreign investment in U.S. cities and overseas labor costs, as well as other factors (such as interest rate fluctuations and energy prices), over which city planners, investors, and local politicians have no control.

Today, major league stadiums, hotel-convention centers, and entertainment districts, which cater largely to middle-class nonresidents, are believed to be prime components of a successful urban center. Yet studies have shown that these increasingly larger and more costly projects—often built despite lack of voter approval and costing more in job-creation funds than other economic development programs—rarely pay for themselves. These sleek edifices contrast with the all-too-common scenario, particularly in poorer urban centers, of severe cutbacks in essential city services. Ultimately, it is hard to disagree with urban historian Witold Rybczynski that "neighborhoods are the lifeblood of any city." By preserving neighborhoods, a city proclaims that it is a place where people want to be.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Anderson, Martin. The Federal Bulldozer: A Critical Analysis of Urban Renewal: 1949–1962. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1964.

Friedan, Bernard J., and Lynne B. Sagalyn. Downtown, Inc.: How America Rebuilds Cities. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989.

Hall, Peter. Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design in the Twentieth Century. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988.

Jacobs, Jane. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: Random House, 1961.

Judd, Dennis R., and Paul Kantor, eds. The Politics of Urban America: A Reader. New York: Longman, 2001.

Kemp, Roger L., ed. The Inner City: A Handbook for Renewal. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2001.

Mumford, Lewis. The City in History: Its Origins and Transformations and Its Prospects. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1961.

O'Connor, Thomas. Building a New Boston: Politics and Urban Renewal 1950–1970,Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1993.

Teaford, Jon C. The Rough Road to Renaissance: Urban Revitalization in America 1940–1985. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990.

Whyte, William H. City: Rediscovering the Center. New York: Doubleday, 1988.

Wilson, James Q., ed. Urban Renewal: The Record and the Controversy. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1966.

Wright, Gwendolyn. Building the Dream: A Social History of Housing in America. New York: Pantheon, 1981.

Cathy Curtis

See also Housing; Housing and Urban Development.

CASE STUDY: THE HILL DISTRICT

A well-to-do neighborhood in the nineteenth century, the Hill District bordering downtown Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, gained a different population after 1870, as the new trolley service allowed the gentry to move away from downtown. The new residents were European immigrants and African Americans from the South seeking factory jobs in an area said to be a haven from segregation laws. During the 1930s and 1940s the Hill District was home to nightclubs featuring top jazz performers. Even in the 1950s, it was a vibrant community with shops, theaters, churches, and social organizations.

As early as 1943, however, a member of the Pittsburgh City Council noted that "approximately 90 percent of the buildings" in the Hill District were "substandard." He urged that these aging stores and residences be destroyed. In 1955, the U.S. government provided the Lower Hill Redevelopment plan with $17.4 million in loans and grants. More than eight thousand residents, overwhelmingly African American, were displaced when thirteen hundred buildings were demolished to make way for what was to be a twenty-nine-acre cultural district anchored by the eighteen-thousand-seat Civic Arena (now Mellon Arena, a hockey rink). After the arena was built, however, the cultural district plan was abandoned.

Former residents received little compensation and minimal benefits from the federal government. Many moved across the Allegheny River to the city's North Side, where, in turn, more than five hundred buildings were razed to make room for a shopping mall, office tower, and private housing complex. Elsewhere in the city, new highways and the Three Rivers Stadium displaced even more low-income residents.

Efforts to build new housing in the Hill District lagged until the early 1990s, when community groups worked with a commercial developer to initiate a $40 million, five hundred-unit residential project on a nearby site, with some government-subsidized units for low-income residents. But the land cleared in the 1950s remained largely unused. By 2002, it had become one of the city's most valuable parcels of undeveloped real estate, prompting the local hockey team—which wants to build a new arena—to propose a $500-million office, retail, and housing development.

The district's city council representative, Sala Udin, was a ten-year-old when his family was uprooted in the 1950s. He supports the plan, but only if the arena (viewed by some as worthy of preservation) is razed, allowing the city grid to be adjusted to reconnect the district's streets to downtown Pittsburgh and to create what he calls "a healthy, organic neighborhood."

CASE STUDY: THE LOWER GARDEN DISTRICT

Built in the early nineteenth century around a spacious park, the once-affluent Lower Garden District in New Orleans, Louisiana, began its long decline after the Civil War. In the 1970s, the crumbling old homes found new buyers, activists who fought to stop a proposed bridge over the Mississippi River that would have split the district in half and cut off access to the park. A decade later, however, many homes were abandoned and storefronts on the main commercial thoroughfare, Magazine Street, were nearly all vacant.

In 1988, the Preservation Resource Center, a local advocacy organization, launched Operation Comeback, a nonprofit program to help potential homebuyers purchase and rehabilitate vacated buildings in seven New Orleans neighborhoods. Owners pay the monthly interest on the loan, carried by Operation Comeback, and contribute their own labor. Architects donate their expertise, and contractors are paid in stages by Operation Comeback through a bank line of credit. When the renovations are finished, the owners buy their homes for the fair market value purchase price plus taxes, fees, and the cost of repairs.

In 1992, working with a $220,000 budget and two-person staff, Operation Comeback had rescued, or helped others to rescue, one hundred houses. Magazine Street bloomed again with restaurants, shops, and small businesses. Another Preservation Resource Center program, Christmas in October, organizes teams of volunteers to repair rundown homes occupied by poor, elderly, and disabled residents as well as blighted community buildings.

As an outgrowth of these middle-class renovation efforts, a combination of private money and government matching grants—under a Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) program to rid the United States of the one hundred thousand worst public housing units—revived the blighted fifteen-hundred-unit St. Thomas Public Housing complex, built in New Orleans in 1939 for the working poor. Begun in 1999, the multimillion-dollar project consists of tearing down older sections of the complex and replacing them with public housing designed to blend in with traditional neighborhood residences. Both symbolically and practically, these efforts help to create more cohesive neighborhoods, the building blocks of livable cities.