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.
