Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 29, 1995 TAG: 9501310086
SECTION: STREET BY STREET PAGE: 4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARY BISHOP STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Congress had offered cities a billion dollars - and new legal muscle - to clear their slums. Before, the power of eminent domain could be used only to build government facilities. Under Title I of the Housing Act of 1949, cities could condemn homes and businesses and deed them to private developers.
New York City's master builder and urban renewal director, Robert Moses, evicted an estimated 500,000 people, most poor and nonwhite, to build expressways, luxury apartments, parks, cultural centers, the United Nations and other developments.
"There was a kind of naivete in the '40s and '50s that assumed if you simply tore down poor neighborhoods, that you got rid of poverty," says Peter Salins, an urban affairs expert at New York's Hunter College.
Herbert J. Gans, a Columbia University sociologist who has chronicled urban renewal's history, has said many displaced families were forced into other slums, and nobody paid much attention.
"Slum-dwellers whose homes were to be torn down have indeed protested bitterly," he wrote, "but their outcries have been limited to particular projects; and because such outcries have rarely been supported by the local press, they have been easily brushed aside."
Another authority on urban renewal, Chester Hartman of the Poverty and Race Research Action Council in Washington, says no one knows for sure how many Americans were displaced, but most scholars believe the number exceeds 1 million.
Chicago State University urban planning Professor Fred Blum said developers worked behind the scenes guiding national, state and local policy so they could acquire large tracts of land adjacent to new highways and turn them into commercial and industrial centers.
As a result, Blum said, the land belonging to minorities became extremely valuable, but they didn't profit. They got little money for their property and wound up in adjoining areas that became overcrowded. Their movement into adjacent white neighborhoods, he said, hastened white flight to the suburbs.
Last year, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development acknowledged in one of its publications that old-style urban renewal demolished buildings, produced "unwanted `no man's lands' and separated people rather than building a sense of community."
Too often, Duke University historian John Hope Franklin said, American cities' urban renewal came at the expense of their black residents.
"I would regard urban renewal as one of the more ruthless efforts on the part of the [American] city to renew itself," Franklin said. ``Roanoke is a microcosm of what happened in so many other places."
by CNB