What sticks out to me about this reading is the discrepancy in perspectives between those who enact urban renewal and highway building and those who are affected by it. Those who enact it seem to be either blissfully ignorant or wholly uncaring that the places they seek to “beautify” are the homes of real people with real lives. Crazy, right? I loved reading about Mary Bishop’s research and how she came to know the people who lived in the poorer areas of Roanoke. These places were typically populated by poor Blacks, who, as housing discrimination goes, were forced into these neighborhoods and kept there without any hope of upward mobility. This was an inevitable outcome of the Great Migration to the North by Southern Blacks. It’s interesting how history would show that, in truth, very little good came of the Great Migration for Blacks, but that’s an aside. I especially liked the explanation on page 65 of how public housing “made the poor poorer”. It truly was a last-minute decision, but I’m not sure if I could really fault the powers-that-be for that one. People were coming—a lot of people—and they had to do something, didn’t they? But more to the point, the people who were coming would settle in communities that were poor and hardly upkept, and those who did not live in those neighborhoods and neither experienced the discrimination nor lived the lifestyle that these people lived would decide to change the city to their own liking. Thus, urban renewal and highway building comes into the picture, which is disgusting. Although, the development of the Cross-Bronx did give us hip-hop, although at the cost of pretty much everyone living in the South Bronx.
I liked Reginald Shareef’s summary of how urban renewal worked. Urban renewal was full of promise, but initiated with ulterior motives. It seemed to bring promise of improvement to the neighborhoods that needed it, and thus improving quality of life, but in reality, it’s meant to cater to those who already have economic means and social standing. Downtown Roanoke is beautiful and consistently being developed, but at the cost of the Black community that once lived there. This is gentrification at work, and it threatens to take Bedford-Stuyvesant within the near future, sadly. I would like to know, personally, what steps can be taken to prevent gentrification. My own neighborhood, which is historically very white and racist, has become rather integrated in the past few years, and I’m not sure how that came about, given Howard Beach’s violent history and relative isolation. Perhaps whatever causes resulted in its integration can be translated to other neighborhoods to promote diversity.
