Toward a Just City? Progression and Theory of Modern U.S. Urban Redevelopment

Where families live is often the largest factor in determining family members' success in life – or lack thereof. Although residential location has been a conduit to economic opportunity throughout the history of the United States, it may not have been more important a factor than during the years following World War II when U.S. housing policy in America’s inner-city neighborhoods began to effect, or possibly inhibit, economic prosperity. As John A. Powell wrote as recently as 2008, “We can tell much about someone's life opportunity by his or her zip code” (p. 1).

Even America’s clergy have commented on the matter. The Archbishop of Chicago, Cardinal Francis George, describes a form of inherent housing discrimination in America – what he calls spatial racism. Spatial racism manifests itself in the development of U.S. communities whereby white residents segregate themselves in wealthy, gentrified neighborhoods distant from blighted, poor, inner-city black neighborhoods (2001).

This is not an ambiguous matter; many scholars have warned of negative neighborhood effects among residents in such areas. Poor health, lower education and income, higher crime, and lower life satisfaction have all been correlated with life in blighted communities (Atkinson & Kintrea, 2004). However, despite the evidence that residential segregation, especially in urban communities, negatively impacts residents’ lifetime chances for both economic and social prosperity, participation in housing policy from those most at risk has, historically, been minimized to a great extent – an effect Flyvberg argues is a symptom of modernist planning whereby top-down decision making reinforces traditions of class and privilege and marginalizes the less powerful (2003).

The Implication of Economic Mobility

The ‘American Dream’ is an idealistic concept embracing the idea that people residing in the United States have opportunity to improve their socioeconomic status. In actuality, however, as there are many factors contributive toward this upward movement, some people are more successful than others in climbing this metaphorical ladder. Such ascension is known as economic mobility, a measure of how much a person’s income changes over time (Butler, Beach, & Winfree, 2008). Economic mobility is not an insular measurement, however. Studies indicate that increases in economic status are strongly correlated with many factors contributing to an overall betterment of quality of life and life satisfaction (Hertz, 2006).

Through a comparison of several leading indicators of economic mobility, this paper examines U.S. housing policy and its effect on Americans’ mobility through the late twentieth century and into the first decade of the 21st century. More specifically, it provides a comparative evaluation of the relative mobility between residents of high-density, urban renewal-era public housing and that of residents living in more recent, federal redevelopment projects constructed under the U.S. Housing and Urban Development’s HOPE VI program. The paper concludes with a brief analysis of the HOPE VI’s ideals and their conformity to Fainstein’s Just City paradigm.

Housing in Despair: Conditions in Late 19th-Mid 20th Centuries

The late 19th century was characterized by dreadful housing conditions in cities worldwide. According to Hall (2002), commentators wrote on surveyor Charles Booth’s 1899 analysis of London’s poor, “Of the one hundred thousand Londoners estimated by Mr. Booth to be in poverty…practically none are housed as well as a provident man provides for his horse” (p. 31) and described the poor’s housing as “…filthy slum tenements…absolutely unfit for inhabitation” (p. 31). Experts agreed that London needed to build a minimum of four hundred-thousand new dwellings to house the poorest residents. In Berlin, the city’s poorest were paying incredibly high proportions of their income to rent over-crowded and inadequately heated dwellings. And in Paris the poor were “…even worse housed than in London” (p. 31).

As epitomized by conditions in New York City, American cities were no better off than their European counterparts. Bickford and Massey suggest that at the turn of the century, New York’s socioeconomically segregated populations “[were] of grave concern to the middle and upper classes, who economically benefited from the teeming masses downtown but simultaneously feared and despised them” (p. 31). Others described sections of New York’s Lower East Side that were one-third more crowded than the most congested European cities and likely to have been the most crowded slums the world. Similarly, a 1908 census of the same neighborhoods revealed that half the residents slept three or four to a room and a quarter of those slept with five or more to a room (Hall, 2002).

Urban Renewal and the Eradication of American Slums

Prominent reformists began promoting the concept of abolishing American cities’ slums in the late 19th century. Among the most influential was New York activist Jacob Riis who’s lobbying efforts resulted in Tammany Hall demolishing the city’s Five Points slums in the 1890s (Alland, 1993). Despite Riis’ genuine concern for the impoverished however, such razing of entire neighborhoods was a pungent foreshadowing of the consequences of displacing whole neighborhood populations. Modern experts like economist Thomas Sowell (2001) have questioned the fairness of Riis’ influence in deciding the fate of those living in the slums. Sowell argues that Five Points’ residents preferred to reside in the low-cost slums which allowed them to save a larger portion of earnings and thereby pay for additional family members’ travel to America. Riis’ promotion of slum eradication was an eerie presage of America’s future urban redevelopment programs undertaken throughout the 20th century.

New York planner Robert Moses may be the most prominent example of urban renewal protagonists. His redevelopment of large portions of New York City during the 1940s and 50s embodied the divisiveness of the movement’s goals, the replacement of slums with newly constructed affordable high-rise apartments devoid of neighborhood character.

Most significantly, post-World War II inner-city, predominantly black neighborhoods saw the integration of urban renewal programs undertaken at each level of government – local, state, and federal. These top-down redevelopment programs reflected modernist planning theories implemented by experts engaged in an Enlightened discourse of rational, deductive reasoning which Beauregard (1987) describes as devoid of regard for the nature of either planners or the built environment.