8. What was urban renewal (aka urban redevelopment)?

Why was slum removal

considered good policy? What national and local programs were implemented to
address urban decline such as public housing, economic development, and transportation
policies? Who promoted certain programs and who opposed them, including real estate
developers, banks, social workers, and unions? How would you evaluate these programs
successes and failures? How did national policy contribute to the rise of the suburbs?
Describe some of the impacts of suburbanization on state and local relations, including
social and class segregation?
Answers:
Urban redevelopment refers to a series of programs occurring in the post ww2 era which
attempted to remedy the perceived degradation of the inner cities both due to the decay of
infrastructure and due to the mass migration of well off home owners into the growing
suburban sprawl. It attempted this through a series of programs aimed at revitalizing the
inner city through a combination of housing, infrastructure, and transportation reform.
Slum removal was considered good policy because it served to remove so called
undesirable elements of society from lands, which in the minds of business owners
could then could be renovated and reused for more economical industries or renovated so
as to allow for the gentrification of an area thus boosting tax revenue.
Beginning in 1949 a series of programs were created to address urban decline through a
variety of means including the 1949 Housing act which empowered the Housing and
Home Finance Agency to distribute grant in aid to help local urban renewal agencies
absorb the difference between each local agencys cost of assembling and clearing a site
and a negotiated below-market price. It also authorized HIHFA to extend loans to local
urban renewal or public housing agencies to cover the cost of land assembly and site
clearance. Local programs used this money to raze whole areas of slum districts under the
guise of doing so for the greater public good, replacing them instead with governmental
and corporate business structures. Additionally acts like he National Defense Highway
Act of 1956 built whole new sections of roads and highways encouraging the growth of
businesses and transportation of raw materials many times at the expense of urban
populations.
Initially the projects of urban renewal were supported by left leaning groups such as
unions and social workers under the belief that these programs would serve the working
and lower classes by giving them access to affordable living conditions. As such banks
and real estate developers who feared that such actions would undermine the status quo
by encouraging racial integration and thus lead to a decline in property values initially
vigorously opposed these programs of urban renewal. Recognizing the necessity for these
groups aid for these programs to succeed government leaders compromised on the issue
of the actual providing of residences by leaving it up to local governmental leaders, who

sadly instead used their newly gotten funds to gentrify former slum areas or replace them
with buildings which benefitted their corporate backers. As a result of the realization of
these mass injustices support for these programs began to undergo a reversal now instead
having the social workers and unions opposing them while banks and real estate
developers opposed them.
Though initially intended for the benefit of the urban poor and for the sake of the general
urban population a combination of greed and racial self-interest served to horribly
undermine the overall effectiveness of the urban renewal programs. Fears that the new
programs would encourage racial intermingling and/or lower property values drove many
first to undermine and then later outright hijack these programs for their own interests.
Instead of being provided with affordable and safe housing many minorities found
themselves instead found themselves evicted from their homes and forced into high rise
slums better known as projects or instead forced into ghettos far from the newly
revitalized urban centers or the burgeoning suburbs. Whole communities were evicted for
the sake of roads, which only served to benefit corporate interests, still more proof that
while these programs had succeeded in achieving the letter of the law they failed utterly
in achieving the spirit of the law.
National and urban policy served to force minorities out and away from the lands that
were later utilized for the sake of the burgeoning suburb communities. New roads which
cut through old communities and discriminatory housing practices allowed upper class
white people to gain homes in territories which were completely inaccessible to blacks
and other minorities thus leading to the rise of suburbs.
The rise of suburbs served to stoke the flames of racial resentment, while upper and
middle class white individuals benefitted from programs which had been tailored from
their original general purposes into new forms which only benefitted a set group they sent
a message to those groups out of the loop that these government institutions would not be
their to aid them. Further resentment was stoked when minorities were denied from the
opportunity to better themselves and their families by moving into better living
conditions thanks to the discriminatory housing and financial practices by local
authorities who misconstrued federal funds into tools to benefit their own political and
racial motivations, thus ensuring decades more of mistrust of government by minority
groups and exacerbating an already highly delicate situation.