03/21

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21
Mar 14

Root Shock

It is extremely difficult for me to wrap my mind around the idea of a neighborhood as close-knit as Northeast, Roanoke was before urban renewal, and it is absolutely devastating that so many people were subjected to the displacement that lead to such drastic life changes.  Now, living in Brooklyn, I cannot imagine a city neighborhood where it is perfectly safe to leave your doors unlocked, children unattended and secrets known.  As a non-native to New York City, I suppose my perspective could be skewed, but even in my small hometown in Pennsylvania, I knew of no neighborhood in which everyone knew and helped one another like they did in Roanoke.  It is heinous–but not at all surprising–that the government would blatantly disregard the needs and livelihoods of an entire community of people in favor of profit.  Is this something you see happening in New York City today?  Where and in what ways?

(One mildly relevant side-note:  As I was reading, I could not help but think of Urban Outfitters’ “Urban Renewal” line, in which old clothing is cut up and redesigned, then sold at a high mark up.  Given the implications of urban renewal as discussed in the reading and the many accusations of racism Urban Outfitters–a massive, high-profile company with a white Republican billionaire for a CEO–has faced, I found this more than a little amusing.)

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21
Mar 14

Root Shock

The common theme seen throughout the reading is the constant disregard toward individual struggles when building a city into a larger economic center for the higher-income population. It seems that this is a common theme as well in America in relation to what we have seen with mass incarceration. To the higher-income population, rounding up blacks and sending them to jail looks like creating better communities with less violence and drug-use. Obviously, this is absurd. But in the long term, one would wonder what the largest American cities would look like had housing never been removed and large buildings never been placed there instead.

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21
Mar 14

How do you stop urban renewal?

Reading this set of chapters, I had two main reactions. The first was a connection to a class I’m taking called Hip Hop and Social Inequality, in which we discussed the 1960s-1980s South Bronx at length in the beginning of the semester. Urban renewal programs in other parts of the city (like lower Manhattan) helped create the extreme poverty, along with the construction of the Cross Bronx Expressway, that was characteristic of the South Bronx during that time. When poor people’s communities were uprooted by urban renewal, many of them moved to the South Bronx because they could afford it, which concentrated poverty there. Communities that have very limited financial resources (and therefore many other resource limitations, because needing money eats up time, energy, etc.) are more vulnerable to exploitation, as seen in the various communities in this reading and in the landlord arsons in the Bronx. That’s not even taking the effects of systematic racism into account.

The other reaction I had was to wonder how can we prevent urban renewal in the future? I think we can all agree that these “development” programs ultimately cause more problems than they solve by uprooting and dispersing vulnerable communities. What in our current system of governance and decision-making allows such devastating programs to be authorized and carried out? My thought is that power over neighborhoods and development/”development” is held by people who have no direct stake in the neighborhood’s well-being, which means that (in the context of capitalism and racist classism) they have no deep motivation to advocate for its survival. A solution to this discrepancy between who makes decisions and who feels consequences could be ameliorated by having community boards, run by people who actually live in the community in question, that have direct veto power over any proposed urban renewal programs and development plans more generally.

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