Blight and the Transformation of Industrial Property

2020 ◽  
pp. 65-88
Author(s):  
Robert Lewis
Keyword(s):  
Public Housing ◽  
Urban Renewal ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Housing Markets ◽  
Business Leaders ◽  
Industrial Property ◽  
Federal Funds ◽  
Property Relations ◽  
Industrial Space ◽  
Land Clearance

This chapter demonstrates how the discourse of blight shaped renewal and how the racialization of urban space underpinned housing markets and urban renewal. It talks about Chicago's political and business leaders who worked to turn some of Chicago's blighted land into productive industrial space. It also identifies agency officials who believed that the overhaul of some of Chicago's “waste lands” for industrial redevelopment would reverse decline by delivering jobs, taxes, and prosperity. The chapter describes the new set of industrial lands and the associated set of property relations that emerged out of urban renewal, which were created by all three levels of government and legitimized in the courts. It cites the Housing Act of 1937, which permitted land clearance and slum demolition for public housing and the Housing Act of 1949, which channeled federal funds to cities so that blighted districts could be redeveloped as predominantly residential.

Industrial Renewal and Land Clearance

2020 ◽  
pp. 112-135
Author(s):  
Robert Lewis
Keyword(s):  
Property Values ◽  
Eminent Domain ◽  
Vacant Land ◽  
Industrial Property ◽  
Federal Funds ◽  
Renewal Program ◽  
Industrial Decline ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Ownership Rights ◽  
Land Clearance

This chapter presents a chronological narrative of institutional fixes implemented to counter industrial decline in Chicago. It considers different programs and institutions that supported Chicago's industrial renewal program and examines the Chicago Land Clearance Commission (CLCC) as the city's major industrial redeveloper in the 1950s that was authorized to designate blighted areas and vacant land as redevelopment projects. It also elaborates the CLCC's key role in the creation of new industrial property as a solution to Chicago's industrial decline. The chapter details how the CLCC used state and federal legislative tools that enabled cities to appropriate federal funds for private ends, to allow the exercise of eminent domain over blighted property, and to realign ownership rights in favor of property developers. It describes blight, falling property values, and declining retail sales as problems that would continue to undermine Chicago's prominence and cut into company profits.

The Politics of Urban Renewal

1971 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 265-280
Author(s):  
P. J. Madgwick
Keyword(s):  
Title I ◽  
Public Housing ◽  
Federal Government ◽  
Urban Renewal ◽  
Residential Development ◽  
Living Environment ◽  
High Income ◽  
American Family ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Slum Dwellers

The Housing Act of 1949 established in Title I the goal of ‘a decent home and a suitable living environment for every American family’. To achieve this goal the Federal Government was to support, by grants and by its legal powers to acquire land, a massive programme of public housing: ‘…it was the first and, until the Act of 1968, the only public housing measure that authorized action that bore some reasonable relation to need’. Nevertheless, the targets set by the 1949 Act for 1954 have still not been reached. Subsequent legislation shifted the emphasis of the programme from public housing to broader schemes of urban renewal, including non-residential development and middle- and high-income housing. The most serious aspect of this neglect of the needs of the poor has been the inadequate management of relocation for those displaced by renewal. For many slum-dwellers in the 1950s ‘urban renewal’ came to mean ‘Negro removal’.

Creative Destruction and Urban Space

2021 ◽  
pp. 97-126
Author(s):  
Miles Orvell
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Life Cycle ◽  
Urban Renewal ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Creative Destruction ◽  
Subsidized Housing ◽  
World War ◽  
Post World War Ii ◽  
Robert Smithson ◽  
The City

This chapter focuses on the deliberate destruction of the city (“creative destruction”), clearing out older buildings to make way for newer, more profitable ones. Penn Station’s demolition is the most notorious example, and the chapter examines the way photographers represented its demise and how it ignited a new preservation movement. Life magazine carried the story of urban renewal through the post–World War II period, including its coverage of the demolition of the Pruitt-Igoe project in St. Louis, which came to symbolize the failures of government-subsidized housing. While creative destruction was considered a necessary cornerstone of capitalism, artists were critiquing the process in works of parody (Robert Smithson) and in the dramatic dismantling of buildings (Gordon Matta-Clark). The whole question of the “life cycle” of buildings and cities is considered, focusing on the work of Alan Berger in his theory of “drosscape” and in Rem Koolhaas’s notion of buildings with a fixed life.

The Rise of Urban Renewal and the Connie Chambers Project

2018 ◽  
pp. 233-256
Author(s):  
Lawrence J. Vale
Keyword(s):  
Public Sector ◽  
Public Housing ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
Urban Renewal ◽  
Low Income ◽  
Mexican American ◽  
Housing Project ◽  
Public Housing Project ◽  
Housing Growth

Chapters 8 and 9 consider the case of Tucson, which reveals a third possible approach to public housing governance and redevelopment, typifying the Publica Major constellation. This shows what can happen when responsibility for public housing remains more wholly vested in a well-functioning public sector, subject neither to the whims of private developers, as in New Orleans, nor to the sway of empowered low-income tenants, as in Boston. Chapter 8 narrates the complex and reluctant emergence of Tucson’s two-hundred-unit Connie Chambers public housing project, completed in 1967 as a supplement to an earlier project known as La Reforma. Public housing growth remained inseparable from the deeply contested process of urban renewal that decimated eighty acres of the Mexican American downtown barrio and purged its residents. Those contemplating redevelopment of Connie Chambers, which was forged in lingering controversy, knew that they could not repeat the earlier ethnically motivated displacement.

The Rise and Fall of St. Thomas

2018 ◽  
pp. 69-88
Author(s):  
Lawrence J. Vale
Keyword(s):  
Public Housing ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
Urban Renewal ◽  
Community Organizing ◽  
Mixed Race ◽  
The State ◽  
Hope Vi ◽  
Housing Authority ◽  
Slum Area ◽  
The 1960S

Chapters 3–5 focus on New Orleans to illustrate one dominant strand of HOPE VI practice—the confluence of a weak housing authority and a Big Developer governance constellation in a city without a robust tradition of coordinated tenant empowerment. Chapter 3 traces the rise and fall of the St. Thomas development, completed in 1941 and later extended in 1952. This replaced a mixed-race “slum” area with public housing for white tenants, an act entailing a substantial neighborhood purge. The fifteen-hundred-unit development shifted to primarily black occupancy following desegregation in the 1960s and subsequently underwent disinvestment that led to a protracted decline. Meanwhile, the Louisiana legislature rescinded the state enabling legislation for urban renewal, thereby limiting its impact on both slum clearance while also curtailing the rise of community organizing. White preservationists stopped the Riverfront Expressway, but no one stopped Interstate 10 from devastating a black neighborhood.

The Possibility of a Housing Authority

2013 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 341-356
Author(s):  
Nicholas Bauroth
Keyword(s):  
Public Housing ◽  
Urban Renewal ◽  
Regime Theory ◽  
Housing Authority ◽  
Government Officials ◽  
Urban Regime Theory ◽  
Urban Regime ◽  
Local Actors ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Civic Center

This study uses urban regime theory to understand the events surrounding Fargo urban renewal during the 1950s. Specifically, it focuses upon the struggle between realtors, banking officers, government officials, and other local actors, as they established a plan for relocating Fargo residents displaced by urban renewal. With a downtown Civic Center as their ultimate goal, coalition partners set aside their differences and produced an unprecedented plan: to avoid any reliance on public housing, relocation would be handled via the private sector, specifically the Fargo Board of Realtors. The study demonstrates that this relocation plan and its subsequent revisions reflected the interests of the individual regime members.

Urban Politics in the United States since 1945

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lily Geismer
Keyword(s):  
Federal Government ◽  
Urban Renewal ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Urban Politics ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Urban Landscape ◽  
Economic Restructuring ◽  
The United States ◽  
Economic Trends ◽  
American Cities

Urban politics provides a means to understand the major political and economic trends and transformations of the last seventy years in American cities. The growth of the federal government; the emergence of new powerful identity- and neighborhood-based social movements; and large-scale economic restructuring have characterized American cities since 1945. The postwar era witnessed the expansion of scope and scale of the federal government, which had a direct impact on urban space and governance, particularly as urban renewal fundamentally reshaped the urban landscape and power configurations. Urban renewal and liberal governance, nevertheless, spawned new and often violent tensions and powerful opposition movements among old and new residents. These movements engendered a generation of city politicians who assumed power in the 1970s. Yet all of these figures were forced to grapple with the larger forces of capital flight, privatization, the war on drugs, mass incarceration, immigration, and gentrification. This confluence of factors meant that as many American cities and their political representatives became demographically more diverse by the 1980s and 1990s, they also became increasingly separated by neighborhood boundaries and divided by the forces of class and economic inequality.

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