Urban Renewal, Civic Distruction
I hate old people, I admit it. Well, let me rephrase. I hate the people who are old now for the things they did when they were young. I have long suspected that the baby boomer generation was a plague visited upon Western Civilization (and that their parents, the Greatest Generation weren’t all that great either.) Case in point: The so-called “urban renewal” projects undertaken by our good friends the bureaucrats in the Department of Housing and Urban Development of the 1960s and 1970s.
Now I happen to be a bit (read: huge) history nerd. And I’ve always been really fascinated by the history of neighborhoods, especially ethnic enclaves. Something about the character of these communities really appeals to me. I suppose it touches on some deep tribal instinct …. or something. But anyways, I happen to be lucky because my hometown has a fair amount of local history and many old neighborhoods. Or at Least it used to.
In the late 1800s the city began to experience a wave of growth that would last nearly a century. Drawn by thriving local industries thousands of new residents flooded in from other states as well as from Southern Europe and the Caribbean. Many blacks joined this rising tide of immigration and, partially due to segregation, established several black neighborhoods around town. Some of these neighborhoods were dangerous slums while others were prosperous middle-class areas, indistinguishable from nearby white sections. The center of the black community from the 1900s to the 1960s was a strip in the middle of town along Central Avenue where a number of black-owned businesses thrived. With black restaurants, night clubs, churches, grocery stores, drug stores, clothing stores, and even a hospital the black community was largely self reliant, a necessity considering Jim Crow. The area became a fairly well known destination of black musicians and entertainers and many famous blacks passed through the clubs, bars, and hotels on Central.
The city continued to grow through the 1920s and the Black and Latin neighborhoods right along with it. That changed with the Great Depression which crippled local industries, retarded growth, and began a long, slow decline.
Following the Depression, WWII brought a measure of prosperity back to the city, with cash flowing in through ship building and government contracts. But by the 1950s that money had dried up and many of the old neighborhoods were back in decline, the legacy industries supporting them having died out, and their residents moving out to the suburbs. Public housing developments began cropping up in the late 40’s, typically located in and around the Latin and Black enclaves. With the wealthier middle and working-class families moving out, the poor became concentrated, turning working-class ethnic neighborhoods into impoverished racial ghettos.
A number of historic neighborhoods became victim to the U.S. Interstate System with huge eight-lane elevated highways built through the heart of them. Looking at a map of the city, one can’t help but notice how the Interstates and expressways pass right over where Black, Latin, and mixed neighborhoods once stood, like the path of an asphalt bullet.
To their credit, civic leaders realized that something needed to be done. Neighborhoods that were once poor and maybe even dangerous but at least economically viable and culturally vibrant were turning into decaying ghost towns. To their eternal shame, the best idea these men (Black, White, and Latin) could come up with was to bring in the bulldozers. Large swaths of historic Latin and especially Black neighborhoods were bought up and demolished. Residents were herded into new public housing developments on the outskirts of town (though the number of homes destroyed often considerably exceeded the number of new units built). The last remnants of these communities, some with a history going back to their founding by freed slaves, was finally obliterated; all in accordance with the City’s grand scheme.
The City’s largest Latin neighborhood before … .
… . and after … .
… .and current.
Naturally it didn’t work. Redevelopment simply never happened. Why would developers want to locate to areas that were essentially abandoned, without any economic base, when there was plenty of land and opportunity to be had near the fast-growing suburbs? Why would the old residents, the people who actually made up the community, ever move back, now that there was nothing there to move back to? In the end most neighborhoods simply vanished, absorbed into the rest of the city, losing all cultural distinctness and energy. Today most are fairly slummy sections, built around pastel painted public housing projects. Others were simply turned in to municipal administrative complexes since they were a convenient place to build boring city office buildings and no one else would buy the land. The Black Business District on Central Ave. was rocked by race riots in the 1960s and most of the hundred-plus black-owned businesses were destroyed by fire and never rebuilt.
Thousands of Blacks once lived in this small section of town in the early 20th Century.
What especially galls me is how the disastrous effects of urban renewal, when the city “committed cultural suicide” as the local paper put it, the wrecking ball fell hardest on minority neighborhoods. The costs of government are almost always paid for by those who cannot afford to avoid them. And the well intentioned bureaucrats, who thought they were revitalizing the city by clearing away the dead wood were utterly blind to the negative effects their plans would have or the possibility of failure- they saw only the good that they intended to do.
In some ways the old neighborhoods had to die. Times change and people change with them. Once the economic bases that sustained these communities were gone and the influx of fresh blood from the traditional sources of immigration dried up it was only a matter of time. But I can’t help but feel bitter about it, 50 years later. The government spent a lot of money building housing projects and tearing down homes, money that could have been used to improve police efforts and lower taxes, thus encouraging businesses and residential growth. At Least the old neighborhoods might have retained some of their unique character, perhaps even enough to attract renewed prosperity when growth picked up again in the 1980s. And some of the worst in terms of drugs and crime might have been avoided by stronger communities. But that, alas, was not the case.
Now, years later those neighborhoods that escaped the full force of urban renewal are beginning to prosper again. Younger families are moving in to the affordable houses and newer houses are being built or restored. Some might call it gentrification but really it’s more a restoration of the ethnic and economic balance that once existed. Meanwhile the neighborhoods that were “renewed” and not buried under pavement remain either filled with vacant lots or run-down slums where abandoned buildings and arson cases are quite common: just another bad part of town. A sad reminder to all of the failure of government central planning.
