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.
21
Mar 14
Urban Renewal
As some of my classmates have pointed out, city planners are not always that bright when planning urban renewal. They are only looking at the financial effects of their efforts and nothing else. But if we are to look at this through the lens of public health, it is very clear that urban renewal is far more sinister than it cheery name suggests.
Many might think this is not a public health issue. It has been proven, however, that the most effective public health endeavors are the socially- driven ones. On an even more basic level, the idea of removing people from their homes and leaving them with no place to go causes serious problems concerning mental health, which another public health issue that needs more attention in this country.
The failure of city planners and large corporations to see the social implications of gentrification is ridiculous and ironic, when we think that these are the same people who have the most to say when bad conditions cause civil unrest. You reap what you sow. This country should not be run with an “us vs them” mindset. When the poor are treated the same as anyone else in this country, we can say that we have finally made progress.
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.
